Point of View: Rites of Spring
Ever trying to reconcile good and evil, I came across in Joseph Campbell’s book on Oriental mythology what Chuang Tzu said when his friends found him drumming and singing after his wife had died.
Not only nature, but mankind had seasons, he said. Why would we think we could alter the eternal round, what use would it do to wail and lament someone’s death?
“Maybe he just didn’t like his wife,” said Mary.
She’s always injecting reason into my reverie. (And beating me far too many times in backgammon.)
But this is spring, the season for revery as well as revelry. No sooner had the leaves popped than our population did too. “Stay in your backyard,” I said to Russell Bennett on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. “Even better, stay in your backyard for the rest of the summer.”
It was during that weekend that I celebrated some rites of spring. No, no, I made no sacrifice to propitiate the gods as in ancient times — I simply fired up the grill and put on some chicken thighs. It is one of the things I do fairly well now. Mary, who’s witnessed my selective ignorance up close (and my general ignorance too), says she doesn’t even know how to turn the grill on or off. A likely story, but in so demurring she’s helped raise my self-esteem.
And earlier, before firing up the grill, I had immersed myself in the waters of our outdoor shower, toasting the Omphalos in the presence of the leafed-out trees and prehistoric ferns with a small glass of Mud House, it being midday.
“I’m trying to live in gratitude and awe amid the mystery of things,” I said to Mary on emerging. “Shintos do that, you know.”
Whereupon I got my leg (shin . . . toe . . . leg . . . kneed I say more?) pulled. “It’s a mystery you haven’t mowed the lawn,” she said. “I’d be in awe if you did, and you’d earn my gratitude.”
Naturally, being a Mariolater, I set forth on a quest for the mower, which had overwintered in the shed, tugged on the cord until it turned over — a third rite of spring — and traversed the mossy front lawn, stirring up a lot of pollen as I went. The headiness of spring is not — sneeze, cough — unalloyed. But I try to remember that it’s all one — the beauty, the allergies, the crowds, all the people frantic to relax. Still, you can’t help but be hopeful this time of year.
It just comes naturally, no matter how much evidence to the contrary there is, here and abroad, and there’s plenty. Still, we live in what East magazine has said is a happy place, so be happy. Well, if not happy, pleasant.
And so I’ve made a note to myself consequently to be pleasant this summer, to be as sunny in disposition as our extraordinary natural surroundings warrant. In fact, the lichen demands it.
Though it is tempting to just stay in the backyard.