On a cloudy Sunday morning, I am multi-tasking. Snow in my front yard, but just a few hundred yards away, the Crocuses are blooming in front of Patti's Thunder Cafe - formerly known as Morning Thunder. Back at home now, I am writing about John Muir for my summer class Nature Literature in America. The topic at hand is the transition in Americans' views of nature at influenced by Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold. The transitions represented by these three amazing writer/philosophers stretch my mind anew every time I read them. I feel especially fortunate that I can still energetically wander in the woods and couple my reading with close contact with "wild" nature. I can experience the transition from winter to spring by simply walking down the hill from my wintery house to the harbingers of spring at Patti's. Not nearly as dramatic, and certainly not as daring, as Muir's scrambling over a range of 4,000 feet in elevation in a single day, nor my own round-trip hike to the bottom of Grand Canyon and back in a single day, yet sufficient to stir memories and provoke philosophical meanderings.
The Crocuses will be open by this afternoon, the forecast for which is Sunny. The daffodils,
however, will bloom later, maybe after the rains expected later this week. I'm experiencing my physical and mental wanderings in a linear fashion, but am frequently reminded that what is really going on is cyclical. It is also political. I am hopeful that the current political winter we (or I) are experiencing will turn into Spring.
