The Free Radical

(Games Without Frontiers by Peter Gabriel)

As Sitka continues to unearth skulls from the pliocene epoch…

…and we stroll by the empty nests from last year’s familial concerns, there’s a certain feeling of abandonment. The Forest is a bit like a ghost town… minus the ghosts.

Everything’s changed. (I know you’ve felt it.)

Historically, it was we who held the world at arm’s length away, not wishing to be too intimate with the beast we’d learned to take for granted.

It’s a new epoch, one which demands our equal participation. We can’t just be passive observers anymore, keeping our heads down, hoping no one will take any notice. We are the Life Carriers, the WingMakers.

Butterfly has come, long before the faintest hope for the first flower’s bloom, to help us complete the transformation. (I could only catch him on the GoPro.)

I stood two days ago on the Mesa and spoke to the still-slumbering tarragon where its brown and dried stalks still stood as fecund memories. “Wake up, little Tarragon,” I said. And the very next day…

…Tarragon was up! My palate rejoices at the prospect for new and varied flavours already beginning in the wee hours of Spring’s dawning.

It seems it’s all been waiting for me, for my explicit consent, for my annual rejoicing. This budding, this flowering, this bursting forth… we clasp in unity, hand-in-paw to this earthly breast.

Okay, so here’s the plan…

I am called to designate this area sacred space– the whole quilted landscape, stitched by these feet. I will erect inukshuks at each of the four cardinal points. In the East, I will encase a poem for the Ancestors; in the West, I will place a song for the Future Generations; in the North, I will bury a secret for only the River to know: and in the South, I will leave tobacco and other sacred herbs.

I will offer myself… as I was created to be– a steward.

Our old relationships have been torn asunder… in case you hadn’t noticed. It is for us now to recreate these loves anew, in accordance with our fresh alignments. We are the calling forth of Life… as always it was meant to be lived, unfettered… in these games without frontiers.