Plumblossom (September)

For we look at the plumblossom in Melbourne hoping for a new year of fresh fruit. Through August and September the plumblossoms break out on the wood, the petals all over the branches, noticeably present. Old concerns and minor resentments are lost in the sight of plumblossom. It is a reminder that a hundred new hopes will rise inside us, dreams will take us into new places, new chances will open up. We may be free of burden and in touch with a beauty that is graceful and light. The day is long. As we travel through nature and meditate on its sheer excess, its massive abundance, it is difficult to countenance words like ‘depletion’ and ‘crisis’ and ‘extinction’. We wish people would lighten up. Our reading and our intuitions give little space for comfort or consolation. It is disillusioning to see that while “the science is in” about human-induced climate change, the people who stand between us and a solution are politicians. And the voices in my head. Like, where do we begin when we are told there is nothing can be done? Make up art? Enter a monastery? Hit the drink? The sunned and savoured overindulgence in which our society passes its days, and it isn’t enough. While our imaginations surge towards tropical dystopias saturated in global humidity and we see in every plant the prototypes for triffids, here in actual September it is our one world we crave. We want its familiar shapes, its seasonal variations, its stubborn insistence in being just the way we always remember it. How it comes up out of the ground. Voices? Voices from everywhere in the transmissions of our now world. Like, your plans will all be subsumed in the consuming ideology, without which no one may be happy. Your summers will be hotter and rainfall will be deluges, your beaches floods and your glaciers turned to rivers. Your creations are just illusions and cannot save you or make a difference to the upheaval of the Earth. Your machines will erase the airways and your computers overload the arguments and your stuffed gadgets pile up on the sides of the street. But soon these voices diminish. Because the mind exhausts itself with lonely fears. We go looking for signs of certainty, in familiar voices and eager eyes. We see the world as we know it today, surprised by little events: someone puts out the washing; an old man says good morning as he walks his dog; the blossoms, all white, or pink, come out on the plum trees.