BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY APRIL 22, 2019) — Awaken.

Arise.

Awash in the first warm breezes of spring, the spears of crocus rise in a Disney time-lapse of memory and mind, 24 frames a second, still pictures whose rapidity creates the illusion of movement. You’ve seen this before. The actual plant before your eyes appears not to be moving at all, but we know it is. The hour hand, too. Tomorrow, it will be that much taller and again tomorrow after. That much. In turn the stalwart spine stiffens; the bud and flower appear unbidden, but how welcome! You want wonder? Miracles? How about the energetic, liquidy work that goes on in a tree as it saps into bloom?

To breathe in that same air, in that same time, affirms a life that — seen in the right way, arms outstretched — runs in synch with the rest of new life springing from old, a transformation that tells us there wasn’t an “old” at all. Never was. Never is. Never will be. “Daily” becomes a synonym with “new,” and each day delivers an opportunity to enter into a novelty colored Celtic green, with white, the color of resurrection.

You cannot be “old” in this synchronicity of spring. Or put it this way: Old only if at night, when you’re alone looking into the bathroom mirror, you honestly realize your regrets outnumber your dreams. If that occurs, you are “old.” Your look to the past somehow became a camping ground where you tragically pitched tent to again occupy the mistakes that comprise “what was.” That, too, is a regeneration, but unlike spring, a dead one.

Forget it. There’s too much life to be lived. Don’t waste it on being “old.” Inhale the redolence of golden oil saturating the palm of an old baseball glove. Look upon the light, lux, streaming through the translucent handles of three screwdrivers (blue, red, yellorange, plus bonus wavelength-colors your eyes can’t detect). Walk on campus. See young lovers stroll hand in hand, like Least-Heat Moon’s moonflower vines, the flowers of which open only once.

Watch the birds come back. They take wing, flutter, build, accept, abide. They use their life as an instrument beyond thought but contained in the conception of awareness so deep, so “Holy,” not one of them has ever experienced the need to compose a prayer. Not one of them presumed to build a church or worry about a collection plate. Let the Abrahamic “Holy Weeks” come again and pretend “revelation” lies in the rituals of the dried twigs and broken branches of figurative winter. Splinters from the True Cross … A pebble that witnessed the glorification of Muhammed … A singed leaf from the Burning Bush. So they say of their deadwood relics. Let those mythic reminders of “guilt” and “sin” be rendered as musical notes for the books of the choir. We possess a different song for a different myth. And both are equally good.

Where is the “life” there that requires something called “faith” to be sensed? Does dogma produce anything not stillborn? Can you see religion’s product? Taste it? Touch it? Hear it? Smell it? Or only its “form?” Do you require faith to know a dandelion flower is yellow? The blue jay — do you need to profess to see it eating the seeds? Can you hear the morning doves without first absolution? Must you confess before smelling the coffee? That is spring, too.

White birches peel off old bark, an alabaster parchment, unparched and waiting for the tale of this unfolding year. A wooded path, melted and muddy with a floor of fall’s soupy leaves, leads to a stream. The flat stones oval the bed like fine tile, and water clear as grace washes away — what, exactly? Not sin, surely. That is a human concept. There are no people here. Just us. Human intrigues expire “like sparks in burnt-up paper.” We become so damaged, just in different ways. One treatment (no cure):

L

O

V

E.

Sit for a few hours in the sun. Have your girl next to you. Watch the breeze give evidence of itself in the way her golden hair moves. Drift like the tune of a mellotron aping an oboe. Take in the clockwise movement of the players touching Chiclet bases from the upper deck, general admission, first-base side. After the game, see sorrel and dandelions rising from the earth in the forgotten stretch of grass that borders a municipal parking lot.

Not games. Not politics. Not deceits. Not insults. Not apologies. Not currency. Not means. Not ends.

Then what, exactly?

The dog-gazing love of anything innocent, anything not human.

Spring, maybe.

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“Ab initio, we are pure.” — Sir Tiberius Fruitjuice.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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