Winter seems at last to have given in regarding its long battle to deter Spring. An unexpected late frost damaged tomatoes and impatiens enough to delay blooming but all survived even if near the ground level. During the exceptionally cold Winter, the Azaleas planted in the front a year ago were frozen completely except for a few shoots coming from the roots. Only a handful of blossoms appeared. Needless to say, Spring planting of flowers and vegetables is behind schedule.

As headlines in the news report, this area and the entire Midwest has suffered record rainfall throughout the Winter and early Spring. Flooding is everywhere and the major rivers are setting record flood stages; many very large crop fields look like lakes. Instead of an emerging Spring, mariner’s home town suffered endless weeks of a weather pattern that hung around the freezing point, snowing at night and turning to rain during the day.

Mariner is old enough that reengaging the labors of gardening after Winter layoff takes a while. Between the rain, grass growing like there’s no tomorrow and a water table high enough that one’s boots splash when walking on the lawn, it will be awhile before the grounds look kempt.

Mariner’s daughter gifted him and his wife with a fancy Cherry tree. Sitting next to a large crabapple tree that blooms rambunctiously, that end of mariner’s home should be quite a display. Mariner also set out his potted Oleander, Amaryllis and the cactus collection from the Sonoran Dessert.

So, all is happy again in mariner’s hometown – especially for the lawn Nazis whose lawnmowers, blowers, lawn trimmers, tillers and power washers are incessant and drowned out only by the cars racing on the dirt track at the fairgrounds. When mariner first drove into his town in 1964, he said, ‘This is a town of lawns.’ And it is. The Town Council passed ordinances requiring lawns not to be too long and the property must appear well maintained.

Nevertheless, it’s nice to walk outside without bundling up and to hear a living world from hummingbirds to riding mowers to stock cars.

Ancient Mariner

Mariner was reminiscing the other day about his teen years. That was a time when weekend dances were common in high school gyms. Living on the East Coast, there were summer beach parties, water skiing, Limbo contests and in the midst of it all dating and beginning to learn ‘grownup’ social skills. Naturally, after a moment, realism set in and mariner realized that era didn’t last very long. Not only that, it doesn’t exist anymore. Everyone has memories, of course, visions stored in brain cells. There are accountings in history books, mementoes, even the old letter sweater. Still, that era doesn’t exist anymore in any form of reality. That chunk of time is gone. Time doesn’t flow; it breaks off in chunks just like a glacier.

Think about the lives of our elders in the year 1900. It was an era where the horse was front and center to virtually every human activity. One accepted without thought the smells, the chores, the care and feeding of horses. On farms, it was an unconscious chore to start the day harnessing old Dobbin. One couldn’t go to town or church or work or haul the product of one’s labor without engaging a horse.

By 1914 the internal combustion engine had replaced the horse – so rapidly and so completely that everything from commerce to politics was reinvented. By 1925, after World War I, the horse was no longer a centerpiece in society. The horse world disappeared. That time broke off as a chunk and was no more.

Reality, that is, an interacting phenomenon that creates new actions and results, is really only about 25 years long. In a Zen moment, one realizes that their own reality has disappeared, too. Having only a few moments that exist in memory, one’s old self is gone.

Similar to a glacier losing a chunk of ice into the sea, the actual chunking process takes a long time. A glacier may take a half century to slowly split and melt to the point that a chunk falls off. Mariner proposes that today, at the start of the twenty-first century, humanity is splitting and melting as it approaches a moment of chunk, when the time one is familiar with today will suddenly be gone. A new time is beginning.

Ancient Mariner