The beauty of the subtropics — as I experienced them for years in Brazil, and on other journeys far and away…

… and now I understand that I was making a home of the Earth, not a home of 

– Spencer, New York, where I was born at the foot of a minor tree-crowned mountain; 
– or Ironwood, Michigan, where the winter snows drifted to the eaves of our house; 
– or friendly Saint Paul, Minnesota, whose lakes were diamonds in the summer sun; 
– or tiny Souris, North Dakota, an islet adrift in a sea of green; 
– or jazzy Chicago, Illinois, its colors and its black and its white; 
– or halus Yogayakarta, Java, its ancient gods and modern desires; 
– or Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, where my adulthood was born; 
– or Boston or Byfield, Massachusetts, where my affluence came and went; 
– or Auroville, Tamil Nadu, whose galaxy of energies called as if by gravity…

A litany of grounds that received my footprint, but were places on a larger map, one with fewer constraints on patterns of thought, and which tries to cover a globe of human understanding, human reaching, and human almost-attaining…

… the beauty of the subtropics is the surge of life which seems never to flag. The flower lifts its head and blooms… and blooms and blooms, to be replaced by yet another flower, once it lays itself down to rest. There are seasons, but they equate to a Season of Life and a Season of Replenishment, where the water falls and the temperature dips — barely perceptibly — to cool the feverish growth of all things. 

On our small farm in the Rincão, there were 2 hectares of fruit trees and plantings above a tiny stream which served as sewage line for the neighborhood, and which remained for the most part unapproachable, a diagonal line nos fundos, at the back of the property. You could hoe the small garden one day, and the next day be facing a jungle again. Life the undeniable! Life the irrepressible, the roses which grew with such abandon as to lose some of their conceit, becoming common as the daisies (while still demanding attention with their thorns). There were so many oranges and varieties of oranges as to be difficult to identify and harder still to consume. There was an enormous spreading fig — not unlike the great banyan tree of Auroville — whose branches spread out over our small cottage and property like the arms of a mother over her children.

*

The light in the southern lands didn't decay as it does here in the north. There is a beautiful sameness to the movement of the skies, even when they dropped copious amounts of water on everything, filling everything. Nothing took its rest, and there was no sense to the word Fall: no common decline that followed a blast of ice, but each leaf deciding, it would seem, when it had been long enough on the twig, and letting go, and that was done. Green was always.

There is a beauty to the seasons that were my birthright, as well, the depth and breadth of the German and Swedish nights made the light of a fire brighter, and the warmth of its flames warmer. The heart makes deep retreat into the chest, a pomegranate seed on the tongue of Persephone, and the light dwindles; into the frigid air of mid-winter, stars spark like traces of magnesium, and the moon like a whole plate of it, while the cells of your body learn the nature of loss.

That is the beauty, the real sense of this season. The ancients knew (because their view was not blocked by a veil of petty goods) that dark was dark. They built temples whose inner sanctum would receive one ray of light, once a year, at dawn on the winter solstice. How could they not celebrate? When the earth had spun round to lean this far away from the life-giving sun, when the fields were clothed in frost and ice, the harvest tucked away for leaner days, how could they not celebrate the birth of the light, the beginning of Persephone's long route home, the savior come to earth?

In the darkest of night a spark most brightly shines.

*

The lyric Water of Sorrow is hardly complete, its melody half-written — perhaps I don't know what to say yet, to the friend whose wife was taken by cancer while in her thirties, in the Season of Life, leaving the scar of a comet across his spirit. And across mine, as well? It has been a year of many losses, many of others, yet all of them mine: in hearing, the heart demands a response, and the mind obeys — the deeper water accumulates and leaks out onto the page or onto the screen. The heart demands a response.

I would laugh, I would like to smile… it is a good season to smile. Not the smile from a shallow well, no, not the rippling laughter from the surface of a stream, not the laughter that stands on the bank of the river, nor the smile which hides in the teeth what is revealed in the eyes.

A good laugh. A winter-fire laugh. A return-of-the-sun smile.