All things shall perish from under the sky

One of the great gifts of my life is music, especially choral singing. My mother’s irrepressible little brother Pierce compares the experience of good choral singing to sex. The deep emotion of hearing great music is unparalleled. So many compositions feel like an adagio farewell to all that we hold dear: Haydn’s “Creation,” Elgar’s Nimrod Variations, Beethoven’s Ninth, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Brahms’ Requiem. Or the folksongs which seem to come right out of the earth. A long swansong during the Long Emergency.

The Voyager Space capsule takes Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Stravinsky (as well as jazz, pop, world folk) into the far corners of the universe, but that music was created for ears attuned to a certain frequency, let alone sensibility. It is a touching gesture, but will probably remain only that. Oh, they could make music, those humans!

All things shall perish from under the sky. Music alone shall live, music alone shall live, music alone shall live – never to die. (traditional German round)

New Sap

We are home again, having greeted our new granddaughter Elora Wren in California last week. I tasted only sweetness, no regret or apprehension as I welcomed her to the family fold. She is new sap.

The following was written a full three months before the cold finally ended. El Nino now threatens, and it may be a very long time before we endure such a winter again.

After an extremely cold winter, it is really warm today. After a week without being able to drive up my road after a sizable snowfall, the last of it melted yesterday. Standing amongst the hardwoods, I can feel their sap rising, replenishing the hickory buds which swelled in December during the last warm spell. And I feel my sap rising. The old-timers call it garden fever.

I am aware of the vast extent of this forest, a target “renewable resource” for the desperate European power industry, which is where most of the beautiful, straight tulip poplar logs I see neatly lashed to logging trucks are headed – chipped, shipped and burned! Yet despite continued logging pressure, the Appalachian Forest remains one of the planet’s biggest carbon sinks. And though we are losing the battle of storing sufficient carbon to halt the onslaught of catastrophic global warming, the growth potential of that sap, my sap, God’s sap unites me deeply, completely, with the Creator’s power to create another earth, another universe after the inevitable decline and death of this one. It’s not about us, not even about this gloriously rich earthly web, but rather the power to create web upon web in world upon world. Forever.