The Free Radical

I’m standing at a precipice; my toes curl and grab the edge of an ancient hesitation. “Is this really it?” I ask myself again. Patiently, my mind methodically goes over again everything I know for sure…

On the evening of March 27th, the local trees woke up. I walked outside shortly before sunset and I could smell the sap flowing through the indigenous forest, an annual sign that the vernal business of life had officially resumed. Perhaps it was in anticipation of the steady rains to come over the next hours and days, the first real soaking since the frost had left the ground.

As the dogs were still busy splitting hares– those poor stark white beacons in an earthy landscape– I was rapidly coming to the end of my winter forage of leftover rose hips. All those which yet remained were small, dry and shrivelled… but I couldn’t complain; I’d had at least a dozen of them every day over the five long months of winter.

And peering through the blinds of changing times, the sure signs of the new foraging season were beginning to abound.

The wild tarragon is coming along nicely now. It’s flavour is much more like sage than the liquorice-vanilla delicacy of its domestic counterpart. Perhaps this year I’ll harvest a few foot-long stalks to bundle together– dried– as a smudging stick. It grows right on top of the Mesa, so it’s loaded with abundant, pure, clean energy.

The wild onions too are showing significant new growth already. In amongst the brown scrub from last year, they’re fairly easy to spot as the only conspicuous green, reaching out.

All parts of the prairie crocus are poisonous; this is not the species from which saffron is harvested. Nevertheless, this sure harbinger of new growth is a welcome feast for the eyes, if not the gullet.

And then we were greeted by our old friend…

Here, I lightened and blued the sky so that he might appear limned in a spiritual light. It was actually miserable and raining, but Hawk seems most determined to accompany us when the weather is the worst.

In this closeup, you can see his feathers underneath are soaked and dripping. He was standing in the rain for me.

He flew from one power pole to the next, leading us on.

Hawk is the telepathic multidimensional eyes of the Sasquatch People. I’ll let you in on a little secret: yesterday I learned– from a trusted friend who channels– the name of the sasquatch I ‘encountered’ last spring. I’ve been told that if I address him by name, he will answer. Since I’m not overly familiar with sasquatch etiquette… yet, I won’t share his name publicly until I get his expressed permission to do so. Apparently, he’s been keeping an intermittent eye on my Forest adventures for at least fifteen years now.

Here’s a picturebook reminder of what I encountered early last May…