#22 THE TENDER GREENS OF SPRING: April 30th, 2023, Boulder

I have an obsessive interest in shooting photos of leaves and flowers. I never tire of it, for some reason, now many seasons down the line. I always think there’s an innate artfulness to the colors, shapes, lines, and textures that doesn’t exhaust itself. The more you look, the more you see.

That’s connected in my mind to Chögyam Trungpa’s dharma art teachings. It certainly doesn’t have to be narrowed to the natural world, but the phenomenal world itself provides an endless array of perceptions. Anytime I’m fully tuning into my sensory fields, especially visually, it’s a jewel box of infinite intricacies. Trungpa called this the “limitless ayatanas” (Sanskrit, “sense fields”). The physical senses, their objects, and how they display in the space of each accompanying mental consciousness (constituting a sense field) become limitless when we stop labeling them and narrowing them into some preconceived narrative. Of themselves, they speak in their own ways. They don’t need our opinions.

I went out a couple weeks ago to investigate the awakening spring. As of April 30th, you’d expect some flowers to be up, at least some daffodils, but almost nothing. Mainly buds and new leaves. Margot thinks that the seasonal change has shifted in Boulder; the fall warmth lasts well into November now, and thus the April flowers get pushed into May. I think about this winter, how it persisted with at least a dusting or inch or two of snow every week, colder temperatures and (for Boulder, a sunny place) grey for many days at a time, like my youthful Vermont winters.

Well, it certainly wasn’t a Vermont winter, at least as I experienced them in the 70s (one year set a record snowfall of 500 inches). Still, April 30th looked and felt closer to early spring.

 

 

Green spaces bloom among recalcitrant, wintry trees, like green mist. Transparent, vibrant, still a little fragile. It’s a charm of early to middle spring that it comes spaciously at first, before darkened, opaque leaves block out swaths of landscape. Now you can see through the buds speckling limbs, and the tempering air retains the pleasure of a fresh, chill edge, as they swim each inside the other.

 

 

 

I think we’ve lost in the ascending rush of our culture appreciation of all the minuscule worlds that exist within larger ones. Budding, birthing leaves constitute a microcosmos, a singularity on the way to something else.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We might favor flowers or autumn leaves, but new spring leaves have a special vibrancy of color and elegance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They might also have a rawness of new birth, the creative essences on their way into expression, enflamed with arrival and essence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The air fills with red, velvet-tipped potencies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Circulating ecstacies of chlorophyll emerge as leaves to adorn latticeworks of still unclothed branches, floating in space.

 

 

The sky can still show through the foliage, which comes to life with a tender green it will lose once the leaves mature and fill their trees. The sweetness of youth!

 

 

 

 

And the softening that comes with some other mind blooming in clusters of tiny florets, whiter than snow, banishing winter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spring engulfs us, but…we are who we are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe so much of the charm comes from the newness of everything, budding spaces, one after the next.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spring light shines through the old, tenaciously holding on but doomed to let go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spontaneous calligraphies of leafing branches write over each other on the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to all that space around them, more naked in their variegated spectrum of efflorescent glory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But maybe all of this is dishonest. I am limiting what I’m looking at by putting a frame around it, but I take pictures so I otherwise don’t have to talk, think, find the words. I can skip to the main point, the expressive vitality that’s already present, and let it have its own say. Maybe what I have to learn here is to stop taking pictures, but…I am who I am.