NATURE'S RESURRECTION
Borland, Hal
Natures Resurrection by HAL BORLAND If 1 believed in omens I might consider this a good year for the affairs of mankind because Easter and the vernal equinox fall only thirteen days apart. Last...
...March was named for Mars and, according to the keepers of zodiac, Mars rules the earth and its affairs from the vernal equinox until April 19...
...We prolong life and wonder what to do with our jobless "elder citizens," and we go on proliferating, especially in the "underdeveloped countries...
...Thus the legendary Teutonic goddess of spring gave both her name and her equinoctial celebration to the occas-sion of the Resurrection when the early Christian missionaries penetrated the dark pagan forests...
...During the reign of Venus lambs will gambol among the violets in new-grown meadows, birds will build nests and celebrate the dawn, and perhaps somebody in the Congo will interrupt internecine diversions long enough to plow a field and plant something besides dragon's teeth...
...I hope so...
...The neo-Malthusians keep warning us, with their mathematical charts, but let someone whisper "birth control" and there is political hell to pay...
...Maybe my mysterious ganglia are participating in the season's rhythm...
...And if he sees resurrection in the surge of sap and the swelling of buds on a maple tree, he is conceivably dealing with the soul and spirit as well as the facts of nature...
...And breathing, I might add, oxygen, not some gaseous elixir of interstellar space...
...As long as man knew, at first hand, that he had to observe the dictates of the season to avoid a harvest of famine, he was properly suspicious of man-made edicts...
...The woodchuck who got away from it all for almost five months wakens and emerges from his den, hungry for food and a mate and willing to fight all other male wood-chucks for both of them...
...He too said "No" to nature...
...The fact that the grass sprang from seed so small it can ride the wind seems more important to me than putting a man into orbit...
...The cat has another litter of kittens in the barn, and the mice don't seem to know that life is any more precarious than usual...
...This ode to industry, as I read it, is dedicated to "the B. F. Goodrich full-pressure suit" in which this no-saying astronaut will ride to glory...
...We had enough snow, and we had enough twenty-below-zero weather, and we said so...
...Maybe the rabbits are better off...
...He summoned the muse on order...
...Not only the human heart but those nervous impulses which constitute thought and probably emotion are linked somehow with the great universal rhythms that constitute day and night and the seasons and periodically create eclipses...
...as loud as we could shout...
...But the fact remains that spring by the almanac and Easter by the church calendar are both reminders of resurrection, rebirth, and the renewal of hope in a better tomorrow...
...And we advance toward the New Frontier, cautiously but hopefully...
...They end when that summons from our particular star, the sun, penetrates to the root...
...Man may yet turn out to be a biological experiment and vanish like the big lizards, but meanwhile it seemed important to get in touch again with the realities...
...By the season, not by order from Washington...
...The equinox came first, but the early churchmen were astute enough to graft their own traditions onto existing pagan customs...
...But when it comes to our own kind we do everything in our power to upset it...
...We call this the balance of nature, and when it works in our favor we applaud it...
...The cottontail rabbit, which soon will be birthing its first litter in the weed patch at the edge of my vegetable garden, would overrun the earth if there weren't so many natural enemies...
...Had I run away from people and their problems to live a selfish hermit life...
...But the season itself tends upward...
...And if we get spring floods, we can't order them to cease any more than we could check the snowfall with words...
...This advertisement, if I know my advertising schedules, was not even inspired by the surge of spring over the flowery countryside...
...New-plowed fields have the same earthy smell that they had when oxen drew the plow...
...We were simply venting our own impatience with things as they are, and even as we said it we were reaching for the snow shovel...
...Last year the span was twenty-eight days, so we are now somewhat closer to conjunction with the timing of the universe...
...If necessary, we shall take to the hills till the floods subside, then come back and plow our valley fields, as always, and plant our crops...
...Perhaps it would be better to note the tendency and wait for man to commit himself...
...True, we develop a pill that seems to retard ovulation, and we test it in the Caribbean...
...The daffodils will soon be in bud, and the first hungry bees will be out looking for pollen and, in the order of things beyond the hand of man, fertilizing ovaries endowed with the urgency to create seed...
...When a political pundit confuses an equinox with a solstice, as one did not long ago, I suspect his omniscience in the affairs of man and I absolutely distrust his judgment of cause and effect...
...There is a subtle change in the beat of the big rhythms, and if man's pulse fails to respond he has hopelessly alienated himself from his own environment...
...No matter how he may phrase it, he knows that his furrow is a signal of his cooperation with universal urgencies...
...I came here to keep my perspective and recall something about human dignity...
...But nature seems to have room for only so many cottontails, so there are owls and foxes and bobcats and various fatal diseases that keep down the rabbit population...
...I wish, too, that they would remember that earth's next zodiacal guardian will be Venus, the goddess of love...
...Its author, working under the pressure of deadlines and an account executive with ulcers, sweated it out in the dark, depressing days of winter in New York...
...And I finally sent him back to the main highway...
...Spring comes...
...How poetic can you get...
...More important, I have found that the search is an adventure itself...
...I suppose one should walk warily along any path that leads even obliquely toward hope in the affairs of man...
...When he "rides it into orbit" he will "say No to Nature as he never has before," says the poet from Madison Avenue...
...Maybe it is beside the point, but I wonder if anyone has ever found the answer to nature's natural balance...
...The equinox states it in terms of the earth, the sun, and the universe...
...The other morning, while I was out beside the old milk house cleaning some of winter's grime off my car, an outland stranger drove up and asked directions...
...When we cried, "No...
...Some of them," I said...
...But nature has a way of driving home her lessons eventually...
...I finished cleaning the car and started to the house, only to see a colony of ants at work on a new mound...
...Ants solved problems of sex and family and community living fifty million years ago but apparently never were endowed with brains which could wonder about the meaning of life...
...Then I recall that in 1959 the gap was only eight days, and since 1959 was a few degrees short of millenial perfection I have my doubts about the significance of the whole matter...
...And when I think that man has so managed the calendar that Easter and the spring equinox can never coincide I know that man's perversity is probably beyond redemption...
...Up to a point...
...HAL BORLAND, who writes the editorials on nature for the New York Times, is the author of "High, Wide and Lonesome," "This Hill, This Valley," "An American Year," and, most recently, "The Enduring Pattern...
...That it seems to check cancer...
...I squatted down and watched them for ten minutes...
...We would rather install bathtubs and flush toilets and telephones in the mud huts of Africa and beside the Asian rice paddies than teach their users the facts of life...
...Crows stalk furrows, waiting for corn to be planted and pilfered...
...Maybe then I could find some answers to the puzzle of this strange adventure, life...
...I didn't try it, but I have an idea that if we had all shouted "Yes, yes, yes...
...He knows that "faith as of a grain of mustard seed" is more than a figure of speech, for every year of his life he has seen seeds, even mustard seeds, sprout under the spring sun and come to growth and blossom and seed again...
...Man isn't as prolific as the rabbit, not quite, but the academic economists keep telling us that man is going to be eating plankton and scrounging among the grass-roots if he keeps on breeding at his current rate...
...Well, man has been saying No to nature a long, long time, despite the Madison Avenue poet's ecstatic statement in the name of B. F. Goodrich, and he still hasn't been able to make that No absolute...
...I was glad that I was a man, not an ant...
...Khrushchev now admits that it will take more than a special session of the Presidium to grow more corn in the Soviet's fields...
...If all their offspring survived, twelve pairs of cottontails would increase to 22,000,000 rabbits in six years...
...Easter dramatizes it in terms of faith and the soul of man...
...But I wish our nervous prophets would remember that Mars was the god of growing things as well as of war...
...So if the countryman hears an Easter summons in the first cry of a spring peeper in the bogland he is not being altogether pagan...
...Then it is spring, as it kas been far longer than man has been here to observe the event...
...But I must point out that after the vernal equinox the day begins to surpass the night and the whole urgency of nature is hopeful and constructive...
...And what did we get...
...A good many of man's problems arise, one way or another, from his forgetfulness of such fundamental matters as an equinox...
...So much for omens...
...we hadn't the least hope of deflecting so much as one snowflake...
...Meanwhile, the sun continues to move northward, as we say in our egocentric, geocentric arrogance...
...But when he asked if I didn't care about people and their problems I said, "I never resigned from the human race...
...The grass in the meadow, sustenance for all animal life including mine, spreads fresh chlorophyll and goes to work, far more quietly and economically than an atomic power plant...
...Australia learned this the hard way...
...He was an inquisitive fellow and before I could set him on the right road he was asking personal questions...
...But winter kept right on coming...
...Maybe this year's minor span between Easter and the equinox will yet blossom into the glory of a man out there in space, triumphantly chanting, "No, no, no," to the spin of the planet and the precession of the stars...
...I understand that Mr...
...It may retard the birth rate, but it may also prolong life in the aged...
...Borland lives in the Connecticut Berkshires...
...But somehow, out here where man hasn't a thing to do with the change of the seasons, or even with the phases of the moon, man's environment seems to be going through the usual routine...
...It was headlined, "Once in a Blue Moon Man Says No to Nature/' and it dealt with an astronaut who is, according to the ad, going to "vault into space" in a "wingless bird...
...I sometimes wonder as I count my vanishing gray hairs and read the latest warning from the population experts...
...I think of this especially in the spring...
...But all winters end, and not by the calendar or the legislative edict...
...I. said no to all those questions, being a patient man...
...Have you found the answers...
...Especially on a spring morning...
...And to "the B. F. Goodrich solid rocket fuels" which "shout their defiance to gravity itself...
...Maybe I am a victim of the season...
...Another foot of snow...
...he demanded...
...to those clouds we would have had precisely the same result...
...Last winter most of us here in New England, up to our navels in snowdrifts, looked at the clouds and said, "No...
...and what is our finding...
...Man's affairs are in a muddle, we are told...
...Every year when I hear the spring peepers down the road and see the flocks of migrant robins in my home pasture, I wonder why man persists in his arrogant notion that he knows all the answers or can run them up at his convenience on his computers...
...I recently read an advertisement created for the B. F. Goodrich Company by somebody on Madison Avenue...
...May's full moon doesn't come until the twenty-ninth...
...Didn't I get lonely out here in the hills...
...Didn't I miss the culture and civilizing influences of the city...
Vol. 25 • April 1961 • No. 4
