Naturalist white goddess

The White Goddess

What we call "spring" really occurs in the latter part of May. Before
that we endure winter and its vestiges, and after that come a fleeting few
months when the weather prospers into maturity.
But spring itself - for two or three weeks in Maine - jumps out suddenly
like flowers on a shrub. In fact, May is almost literally a flower. Stems and
buds redden, and then a sort of supernatural apparition materializes.
Several whispering shades of green emerge in the woods, and for a couple
of weeks those soft jades and olives flood hills and roadsides. Then,
blossoms unfold.
The directest sign that the world - at least the one I live in - is teetering
into that perennial delirium is the appearance of shadbush blossoms. The
trees are mostly gangly-branched creatures 8 or 10 feet high leaning after
sunlight, and aren't really noticeable any other time of year. But their early
leaves have a brick red fringe and an evening-yellow duskiness, and on
that background appear star-shaped white flowers of five widely spaced
petals each. It's called shadbush or shadblow because its blossom time is
about the same as when the shad, of the herring family, run up rivers to
spawn. It's also called juneberry or serviceberry, and is of the rose family.
A rose by any other name - like wild strawberry which has been abundant
this year at our house, or crabapple, hawthorn or chokecherry who are all
throwing out flowers too - is equally sweet, but the shadbush blossoms in
my lexicon stand for the first mid-May my wife and I coupled up. That
was true madness, it seemed to me then and every spring since, because
every pastel green place I looked, I thought I saw her face, especially in
the shadblossoms. Once you know what to look for, it's suddenly
everywhere.
I still see it now. In spring everything young becomes oblivious to
everything except the way it produces itself. Nature unfolds the life force
into visible shapes. The flowers of shadbush, lilacs, rhododendrons, and
then the honeysuckle and every other force, appear to be crystallizing out
of something invisible, like drops of water taking form out of air on
morning grass, or like time-lapse video of clouds boiling from empty sky.
The unfoldment of May has a headlong momentum of its own that gives
it the feel of a living, breathing being. In ages past in Europe the whole
phenomenon of spring, and in turn the motion into summer, fall and the
death and dormancy of winter, was understood to be a white goddess who
each year revealed herself in blossoms, especially on trees and shrubs. Not
a person but an overwhelming force that crystallized out of the green and
the people and everything else. For a fleeting moment in May there was
no difference between who they loved and spring herself, and out of it
came May Day and poetry. The whole north slope of Mount Harris in
Dixmont turned soft green a couple of weeks ago and then, when the
shadbushes blossomed, unfolded into the air and sky and everywhere else.
Or so it seemed to me. You live like who you are in this green. We call it
simply "spring," but even when it had different names in eons past it was
still the same headlong perfection of life run amok. The forces in the trees
express themselves in flowers. The ancient ollaves and bards expressed
the same forces in poetry, which (we might recall) Poe defined as "the
rhythmical creation of beauty." A force that you become every time it
dazzles you there in the green and you say so.

© Dana Wilde 2009
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