21

Practice Being Peonies

Moss

Daylight never comes here,
yet Spring’s arrived:
moss flowers, small as grains of rice,
practice being peonies.

— Yuan Mei, translated by JP Seaton, from I Don't Bow to Buddhas: Selected Poems of Yuan Mei, Copper Canyon Press

Thank you for calling The Botanarchy Hotline. The Botanarchy Hotline is medicine disguised as a poem, delivered through the portal of your phone. It’s a ham-radio séance between you and the living Earth, for those ready to be bewildered back to life.

The transmission at the end of your telephone line is Episode 21: Practice Being Peonies. It’s the Lunar New Year, the hills are luminous with winter’s excess, and today on the hotline we practice the art of being peonies, honoring the handoff from Water to Wood as the green current surges and sap begins its vertical prayer.

Today’s broadcast opens at Lìchūn, the solar term known as Start of Spring. Lìchūn is a threshold, a subtle realignment of the inner compass. It moves the way warmth returns to cold hands - slowly, unevenly, as a blush beneath the skin before language can catch up. Winter still grips the hills, green and swollen from stormwater. Frost lingers in the shadowed folds of canyon and eucalyptus. But beneath bark and skin and old vows, something ancient stretches and remembers how to rise.

Direction wakes up before speed.
Desire wakes up before plan.

This is the season when potential grows moist and begins negotiating gravity. When what has been stored in darkness starts flirting with verticality.

And moss - our patron saint of Early Spring - is already rehearsing the seduction.

Moss.
Understory lover.
Shade dweller.
Keeper of slow green secrets.

Moss whispers "Begin low. Begin where the poem kneels.”

Daylight rarely touches this place, and still… spring has arrived.

Spring does not require ideal conditions, rather arrival happens by attunement. Moss flowers appear -- grain-sized, nearly mythic. They carry no spectacle, they rehearse abundance without needing scale. They remember the peony pattern and practice it in miniature.

This is Lìchūn instruction: gesture before declaration, form before flowering, direction before speed.

The body understands this language.
So does the soil.

The poet who offered us this teaching walked askew to orthodoxy. Yuan Mei was a Qing-dynasty poet devoted to lived texture…pleasure, ghosts, gardens, kitchens, women, wit. He distrusted rigid morality and preferred intelligence that could laugh. He noticed what others stepped over. He trusted small truths. He wrote poems that live comfortably inside bodies.

A perfect guide for moss.
A co-conspirator for peonies.

Let’s just say it plainly, dear caller: the Gregorian New Year is a bureaucratic hallucination. January 1st is a fiscal quarter in a trench coat. Nature does not reset simply because a calendar flips. The Earth does not consult your planner. Everybody knows the real new year arrives when the land says so. And here, in mid-February Los Angeles, the hills are neon green from winter rains, arroyo creeks are running again, wild mustard is flaring yellow along the 5 freeway, and the robins gather in gossipy flocks before dispersing upslope. This is the reboot. This is the turnover. This is when Water hands its inheritance to Wood and the sap begins negotiating verticality. Lunar New Year tracks the moon. The soil tracks moisture. The body tracks light. Nature does not lie, and she does not care about your Q1 goals. She cares about timing, temperature, tilt, and thaw. If you want to know when the year begins, look to the hills, not the headlines.

(Cont’d below)

Book Rec: I Don’t Bow To Buddhas: The Selected Poems of Yuan Mei, tr. JP Seaton