Biodiversity, biodestruction












Dementia, fears, & mirrors







How do you face your fear?






photo by David Sloan





In the vegetable patch, pole bean seedlings send up new, green tendrils–slightly streaked with purple–that wrap around the bamboo “teepee”. Sweetpeas begin to stretch their threads out and up as though seeking support; they’ll even twine around grass stems. With all this rain, tomato plants surge and leaf out.

13568809_10210037198150804_7456809613944121549_oAmong the perennials, weedy vines snake and coil: poison ivy, virginia creeper, bindweed, creeping charlie, nightshade, wintercreeper, wild cucumber. These plants make the process of keeping my perennial beds “clean” very challenging.

But the clematis vines, which I love, also use tendrils to spread themselves over bushes and trellises.



In botany, the curl or tendril is termed cirrus. Visualize the cirrus cloud, thin and thready and curled:


It’s easy to imagine how the apparent action of tendrils inspired metaphor and why humans so easily anthropomorphize the twining and vining as grasping, embracing, tugging, clinging, clasping–terms that are by turns tender and aggressive in implication. The plant’s tendril is, in fact, sensitive, another word that can be used to describe people but which means, in botany, something closer to irritable (susceptible and responsive to touch). The Encyclopedia Britannica says:

Tendrils are prehensile and sensitive to contact. When stroked lightly on its lower side, the tendril will, in a minute or two, curve toward that side. As it brushes against an object, it turns toward it and—the shape of the object permitting—wraps about it, clinging for as long as the stimulation persists. Later, strong mechanical tissue (sclerenchyma) develops in the tendrils, thus rendering them strong enough to support the weight of the plant.

Usually, that means a movement upwards–toward light, against gravity–another metaphor we human beings like to adopt.

Because these are things all human beings need: support, and a way to move toward the light. A little sensitivity helps. Then, strength can develop; we can bloom.


Love & reflection

alice-heart1 copy

We express love because the gratification of love is enormous, and we continue to express love and to act protectively because the loss of love is traumatic. If we did not experience pain on the demise of those we love, if we had the pleasure of love but felt nothing when the object of our love is destroyed, we would be considerably less protective than we are.

It may also be that the very structure if consciousness opens the pathway to depression…To give up the essential conflict between what we feel like doing and what we do, to end the dark moods that reflect that conflict and its difficulties–this is to give up what it is to be human, of what is good in being human.

–Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

Reflection is a sign of consciousness, the ability to take in information and observe how it feels to be oneself in the face of that information, and to assess the impact of behaviors and actions and catastrophes and deaths. Socrates, the irritating questioner, required of human beings that capacity of reflectiveness. Solomon suggests this reflective ability is natural to people who undergo a depressive episode: “The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed.” (italics mine)

Yet it is also this reflective consciousness which permits recovery among those who’ve been in the abyss, and sometimes a kind of bounce into remission/relief. Solomon adds that “[p]eople who have been through a depression and stabilized often have a heightened awareness of the joyfulness of everyday existence. They have a capacity for a kind of ready ecstasy and for an intense appreciation of all that is good in their life.”

That sense of “ready ecstasy” often acts as the impetus for poetry, in my experience. I am not sure that joyful awareness was worth the pain and despair–couldn’t I have just achieved heightened awareness through, say, meditation, song, or religion? Nonetheless, if I can craft a relationship with depression that is not a destabilizing battle, that’s enough for me. The recognition of joy and the critical thinking that reflection deepens in my consciousness keep me striving.

Yesterday morning, early, in the long grass, the three-legged doe gave birth to a fawn. I watched as they emerged from the meadow and headed for the woodlot together, mama still licking the little one.

Earth delivers ecstasies readily, if only we will observe.

ann e michael