Is It Spring Already?

    In his poem, "The Peace of Wild Things," Wendell Berry talks about getting out of bed when "despair of the world" prevents sleep. He goes and lies down in the grass by a pond and lets the peace of wild things, "who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief," flow into him. He rests, he says, "in the grace of the world" and is free.

    I like to lie in the peace of wild things, too, but lately their peaceful lack of worry about the future weighs heavily on me. I feel not free but burdened with responsibility. Wendell's poem was published in 2012. Certainly we were aware of climate change then, but in the last decade my grief for the future has grown exponentially. 

     Last Saturday, hiking up the Little Grayback trail, I saw two shooting stars in bloom and a manzanita bush in full flower. Today as I walked up the mountain I live on, I saw pedicularis (elephant's trunks) already emerging. And birds are singing in the trees again. I have been seeing robins all winter. 

    Usually I rejoice at the signs of spring, but they bring little peace and pleasure to me now because it shouldn't be spring already. It's only the middle of February, for God's sake. Usually if signs of spring appear too early, I'm worried about a late frost. "No, no! Too early!" I tell the flowers and fruit trees. "It'll get cold again. Go back. Go back."

    But now I'm not worried about a late frost. I'm worried because it's all out of whack. Shooting stars should not be coming out in February. Birds should not be returning in February. Manzanitas always bloom early, but not this early. Spring in the middle of February? We haven't had winter yet. 

    Most of all, if it's so warm that the wildflowers are already out, what is going to happen to us in July? The snow that fell in southern Oregon in late December has miraculously stayed at the highest elevations, but, as my friend Janeen points out, usually the mid-elevation peaks would also have snow. This year they are bare. Temperatures in the 100s, drought, wildfire—how early, I wonder, will those summer plagues appear this year and how often?

    Not long ago scientists were predicting that the warming trends would be disastrously irreversible in however many decades, adding that it would probably happen even faster than they were predicting. But now even I feel the avalanche effect of climate change. It is here and now and it affects and will affect us all. If you don't have the wildfires of the west, you have tornadoes in the midwest, hurricanes on the east coast, floods anywhere, all with more ferocity than ever. California is seeing the worst drought in 1200 years. Florida is already beginning to drown. Island nations are losing land. The tundra is thawing. Even if you don't see climate change phenomena where you live (but you will), you will certainly feel the effects of all the people seeking new places to live as their homes become uninhabitable. 

    Thomas Berry (no kin to Wendell), says, "The human is that being in whom the universe comes to itself in a special mode of conscious reflection." We have failed our responsibility of being that consciousness. I want to go around apologizing, to the wild things who in their individual beings bring us peace, for what we have done to their world as well as our own.