23

The nation shattered, mountains and rivers remain.

Spring in the city: grasses and trees grow deep.

Feeling the times, flowers draw tears.

Hating separation, birds alarm the heart.


— Du Fu, translated by Burton Watson, from The Selected Poems of Du Fu, Columbia University 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 23: Mountains And Rivers Remain. It’s peak spring, known on the streets as nature’s debutante ball, and today on the hotline we’re reporting live from the ruins, where the grass is back and frankly doing a better job than we are.

We’re broadcasting tonight from that luminous hinge in the year when the cosmos pauses to take its own pulse: the Spring Equinox, known in the old ecological Chinese calendar as Chunfen. Here the long argument between light and darkness resolves into something more interesting than victory: balance.

For one brief shimmering instant the world balances in that living tension where nothing overreaches and nothing recedes. Yin and yang rest in mutual accord, the long conversation between them settling into a quiet, generative stillness, like a moonlit lake where sky and water become indistinguishable. And if you listen closely, you can feel the entire planet taking a slow, ceremonial breath before the next act begins.

We open tonight with a poem written nearly thirteen centuries ago by the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, a man who knew something about watching the human world fall apart while the natural world carried on with its business like a hawk circling above the 101.