The Scent of Green

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

~Jean Arp

"Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises."

~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

I like to think of spring as being something subtle, a seasonal change that comes upon us silently and by degrees, not with a sudden flash that excites the retinas, welcome though it may very well be, but, when you venture into a temperate zone only once or twice a month, change can seem abrupt this time of year. A week or so ago, when I last ventured into the relative warmth of a lower elevation, the majority of trees and shrubs were leafless, only brown and grey stems in a landscape of native firs and pines with their limited green hues, but yesterday! I felt like Dorothy (OK, maybe Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, or Scarecrow) waking up in a field of glorious green. And what a diversity of greens! The light clear green of absinthe, a denser, sour-apple green, and piquant lime green, all making broad, painterly brush-strokes against the viridian, almost blue-green background. But it was the lighter shades that attracted and held my attention, and I marveled again/still at the process of photosynthesis and the gift of chlorophyll. I was suddenly back in college botany, and the 'Krebs Citric Acid Cycle' momentarily filled whatever brain cells were simply idling, though I could recall little of the process. Strange the things we retain in our fleshly filing cabinet. A few days of warmth and sunshine and we'll be floating in foliage of every shade of green, right here. Already Hostas are breaking ground. Is it any wonder we are awed by Spring?