it rained in the late fall/early winter and then there was a longer dry spell, and i began to mourn the rainy season, maybe it was just going to be a dry year. but then for the last month and a bit it rained quite a lot and i quite enjoyed it. i realized i wish id been sowing seeds to germinate in the rains, but i hadn't imagined thered be any. needless to say i got sowing but felt like i'd maybe missed an opportunity to anticipate and plant the literal seeds for opportunities to come.
strikes me as a rather potent metaphor for whats happening. we are at the beginning of a long dry spell. the once-green plants are starting to desiccate, soon they will dry out and many will die. but eventually the rains will come, maybe not all at once, there may be yet more waves of mortal dryness, but the eventually there will be growth. eventually there will be vigorous growth, but of course it will never be as it was before. but certain seeds only grow on the parched ground where the plants that would once have blocked the light have shriveled and died back. some seeds only open in a fire, certain trees only mature in areas of disturbance, just as others take decades to thrive after several stages of succession. sometime it is the decomposing flesh of forebears that gives the nutrients necessary for the next generation. too often also, disturbance sets the stage for invasives to radically take over, and i fear this too, though there are measures to take with foresight to do all we can to allow more of a balance to emerge when its time comes.
it's not clear how dry it will get except that this is only the start, our predictions will seem naïve much sooner than we can imagine. but surely will be another bloom to follow, probably not in a month, maybe in three if we're lucky, but more likely 6, 12, or 18, i prefer not to think about just how long we will wait for the green to return. but also sooner than we think this will be behind us and seeds of all kinds will germinate, some already planted, some during the dry, and others we will only think to plant after the rains have already come.
so i ask, what seeds should i be planting now? what earth should i be readying, or leaving fallow? what seedlings should i begin in shelter so that they will be strong and ready to take quickly to the newly supple ground?
mass extinctions usher in new taxa never imagined, financial crashes set the stage for entire new industries, personal and national tragedies spurn personal and national reinvention and rebirth. those seeds planted with foresight will be ready when their time comes, an opportunity that is proportional to the calamity that preceded it. its not just that i find imagining the present in retrospect reassuring, though without a doubt i do. but every day it becomes more clear that what is happening now is in a category all its own, maybe the most significant set of global events in my lifetime. maybe that speculation will seem foolishly grandiose, but maybe it will seem too small-minded or incurious. part of me wants to wait to see what the new order that emerges will look like, to wait for the acceleration to stop accelerating, but of course that will happen once this earliest window of possibilities has begun to close. i sense now that there is something special about this period in particular, when the old foliage is still all around, just feeling the scorch, the old world in clear memory, the present confusing, and future overwhelmingly unknowable. but thats the point after all, the future unknowable because its tracks have not yet been laid, its seeds not yet germinated. the point is that the future is malleable, chaos leaving a vacuum of endless possibilities. its hard even to imagine what the seeds should be, let alone where or when or how or why to plant them, but if i know one thing it is that is still early, but it will eventually be late. i think i have a sense of what was before, im gaining a sense of what is now, what will come after?