Personal Voices: Counting on Wildflowers

April 5, 2004

April is the cruelest month and will be the bloodiest yet for U.S. troops in Iraq, but we don't know that today. Our peace group is bringing Dennis Kucinich to the area tonight, and we are excited about what he'll say. In the morning, my husband Mario and I go into the woods and try to relax after a stressful week of organizing. We are grateful some nearly wild places still exist. We know we'll find flowers in the forest today. People are dying all over the planet, but nature still grows flowers where she can.

My tension and depression evaporate -- nearly -- as I walk the Falling Creek trail deep into the Gifford Pinchot forest. I can't be thinking of anything except where I am: Lions and bears roam these woods. Trilliums -- the first flowers of spring -- are beginning to pop up in the dark green underbrush, white and pink three-petal flowers, like recessed landscape lights showing us the way through the forest. Yellow violets display their pansy-shaped faces. We count 62 trillium, and eight violets.

That night, Dennis Kucinich tells us we need� reconciliation with nature." We need to create a world "where peace is inevitable, where the human heart dwarfs war." He quotes Tennyson, "'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."

April 11, 2004

British officers complain about the use of violence against Iraqis by American soldiers. One officer says the violence "is over-responsive to the threat they are facing."

We go to Falling Creek and count 136 trilliums, 86 violets, and 15 Oregon anemones. We also find our first deer's head orchids. These tiny purple orchids with blossoms about the size of my thumbnail look like tiny slippers lost by Barbie and stuck on the end of a six-inch pole, or like the heads of a tiny deer with tiny purple antlers. Whenever I see this fragile flower growing in the wild and woolly forest, I know anything is possible. We count 38. Vanilla leaf plants have started coming up, too. They grow about a foot off the ground and have three leaves. When they first appear, they are light green -- new green, what the crayon box calls sea green. They shake in the wind and look like so many green hands waving excitedly, "We're here! We're here!"

April 18, 2004

The 9/11 hearings are depressing. Ashcroft apparently didn't like the way he was treated, and he had a memo declassified and released to the public, which says Jamie Gorelick wanted "the wall" between agencies that everyone is complaining about. I thought information was classified or declassified according to national security, not politics. It is nearly impossible to be idealistic these days.

It has been raining. The trilliums are bent over and folded up, dripping wet, and I think of homeless people out in the rain; their bloom long ago washed away. Today the woods are filled with hope and possibility; we count 150 deer's head orchids.

April 26, 2004

The photographer who took pictures of the flag-draped coffins of dead soldiers was fired from her job. They should show every aspect of this war. Every night on the news they should show footage of what is actually happening in Iraq: People are dying. And dying, and dying.

On the trail today, the fiddlehead ferns are beginning to uncurl. They look just like ... fiddle heads. Or green arthritic fingers starting to feel the cure. The dogwood have buds. We see our first bear grass blossom. Bear grass looks like tufts of shiny green hair growing out of the forest floor -- 1/2" wide hair. In the middle of these tufts, a shaft emerges. Hundreds of tiny flowers eventually unfurl from this shaft. We count 168 deer's head orchids.

May 3, 2004

The tales of torture of Iraqi prisoners are so awful. I don't know what to do in the face of these horrors caused by my tax dollars except keep writing, keep contacting my representatives, keep talking. Flowers are blooming around our home: California poppies, rhododendrons, peonies, and hydrangeas. I stand outside and stare at the poppies. Has anything in the world ever been as orange? They flower again and again, despite rain, sleet, heat, despair.