Greening into winter

This piece was featured first on Jan 8 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

What do you do over the holidays? Our family got into Ursula K. LeGuin. (Better late than never!) It started off with a wonderful compilation called A Larger Reality, filled with writing by and about LeGuin. Then I went on to Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home. My wife is reading The Dispossessed for a book club she’s leading. And I can’t help but read LeGuin’s little talks to help make sense of her work.

If you don’t know her, LeGuin was a legendary science fiction writer (and poet!) who graduated from Berkeley High in 1947. Her father was the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, whose work with and around California’s indigenous tribes is hotly contested.

For this moment, though, right after those intense rains, when the reality of *our* winter is really settling in, I wanted to send you all a gorgeous passage from Always Coming Home. The book takes the form of an anthropological treatise about a post-apocalyptic people called the Kesh, who live in the Napa Valley of the far future. LeGuin’s family had owned a farmstead in Napa while she was growing up. After years of failing to capture the significance of the place, this book was her northern California book. “I tried to write that hereness,” she said. “To use without exploiting; to move in the sacred land that is also the commonplace world; to dance the way they dance in the valley.”

OK, I have kept you waiting long enough. Here’s the passage from Always Coming Home:

“It was always an austere land, generous but not lush, not soft, not gentle. It always had two seasons: one wet, one dry. The rains and the heat can be fierce, frightening. Growing things go through their sweet slow steady order of flowering, ripening, resting as they do anywhere, but the turn from one season to the other is less transition than reversal. A few dark-grey, pouring days when the burnt and sodden brown hills brighten suddenly into the aching, piercing green of the new grass. . . . A few cloud-flurried, shining days when the orange poppies, the blue lupine, the vetch, clover, wild lilac, brodiaea, blue-eyed grass, daisies, lilies are all in bloom, whole hillsides white and purple and blue and gold, but at the same moment the grass is drying, turning pale, and the wild oats have already sown their seed. Those are the times of change: the greening into winter, the dying into summer.”

That’s something to keep next to your heart over these coming months. Green into winter, die into summer. It’s our way.

I have to say that one way I am not a native Californian is that I do not sufficiently appreciate the rain. Raised in the wetness of the northwest, water has never felt like a gift, but a punishment. One day, I hope, I will say the incantation of our people and I will really mean it: “We really needed the rain.”

I am making progress, though. I hope to make it out to Briones Regional Park during this drying-out week because I know that the hills there will be fluorescent. There’s a reason that philosophers use the perception of color as the defining experience of what it is like to be conscious (qualia!). So many ways to say green and none of them feel alive enough to capture the hillside glowing with photosynthesis.

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Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum

My Tipline

New poetry reading series in Oakland hosted by Ben Gucciardi: Sundial.
BAMPFA is showing the films of Wong Kar Wai in January!
Artist David Wilson has a gorgeous new show at Minnesota Street Project. Opening reception is Saturday.
The 15th Annual Bay Area American Indian Two Spirits Powwow is coming up next month.