22

Little Pines



Poking up from the ground barely above my knees

already there’s holiness in their coiled roots.

Though harsh frost has whitened the hundred grasses,

deep in the courtyard, one grove of green!

In the late night long-legged spiders stir;

crickets are calling from the empty stairs.

A thousand years from now who will stroll among these trees,

fashioning poems on their ancient dragon shapes?

— Ch’i-chi, translated by Burton Watson, from The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China, Wisdom Publications



Thank you for calling The Botanarchy Hotline. The Botanarchy Hotline is medicine disguised as a poem, delivered through the portal of your phone. It’s a ham-radio séance between you and the living Earth, for those ready to be bewildered back to life.

The transmission at the end of your telephone line is Episode 22: Already There’s Holiness In Their Coiled Roots. It’s early spring, winter unclenches and the sky finally lets itself feel, and tonight on the hotline we’re broadcasting from the soaked seam between freeze and unfurl. This one’s about coiling -- about caterpillars hanging in quiet architecture, little pines hoarding rain in their roots, and the dragon shape assembling itself beneath hills gone reckless with green.

We find ourselves at Yushui -- Rain Water -- the second solar term of spring in the taoist calendar. This is the moment when what has been locked begins to loosen, and the body of the year starts to remember how to move. Here, on my perch in the wildland urban interface of the Hollywood Hills, Yushui looks like wet sage and split eucalyptus bark and the erotic musk of soil finally touched. It looks like the spoils of our winter labors flaunted flagrantly across hillsides and freeway underpasses. Places that, by mid winter, had already seen nearly a full season’s worth of rain in a few months, shattering old local rainfall records and padding the cisterns of watersheds that had been bone dry for years.