Flowering Earth

Flowering Earth or Emergency Earth: Resetting Normal

"The extreme temperatures of 2023, 2024 and 2025 will be seen as cooler than average in just a few years.  Continued fossil-fuel emissions are rapidly resetting what the world considers normal."

—Samantha Burgess, European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service

“That’s the big difference between where we thought the world would be in 2015, and where we are now.”  —Samantha Burgess

‘New Climate Reports Show ‘Unprecedented Run of Global Heat’

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13012026/multiple-reports-show-2025-extreme-global-heat/

Flowering Earth, figuring Sky, forgiving Seasons: this boulder is part of a complex of rocks, petroglyphs, and alignments at a place of passage.

Chewaucan basin, Lake County, Oregon. Photos Douglas Beauchamp

Morning light throws deep carving of Earth Flower in relief.

The Stone Verdict

And after the commanded journey, what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.

And it is not particular at all,
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

—Seamus Heaney

Air spanned, passage waited, the balance rode,

Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store

Witnessed itself already taking place

In a time marked by assent and by hiatus.

—Seamus Heaney

NOTE

—Petroglyphs, stone, lichen, stains, rock varnish — discrete galaxies in constant change.  Eastern backslope of Abert Rim, Lake County, Oregon.  2025

Seamus Heaney selections:

—top: from the poem Lightning in Seeing Things (1991)

—above: from Settings, XIV, in Seeing Things

—below: from The Stone Verdict in The Haw Lantern (1987) 

Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was awarded the Nobel in Literature in 1995.

CODA

from The Stone Verdict

Let it be like the judgement of Hermes,

God of the stone heap, where the stones were verdicts

Cast solidly at his feet, piling up around him

Until he stood waist-deep in the cairn

Of his own absolution: maybe a gate-pillar

Or a tumbled wallstead where hogweed earths the silence

Somebody will break at last to say, 'Here

His spirit lingers,' and will have said too much.