Half is Whole

“An inevitable dualism bisects nature,” states Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, ‘Compensation,’ “so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole.”

​These days pull time and nature one way and then another. It is spring but winter. Signs of change accumulate, but they are still often overwhelmed by the cold fields of their nemesis.

I am compulsive about ignoring the dominant brown and gray of late February. I only watch the movement not the stasis. I see what I choose, the suggestive blush of color or the swelling of one bud or another.

The real dualism of which Emerson writes is still a month or so away. In April, I can look both ways; the sides are almost even: bright hepaticas, twinleaf, bloodroot on the one hand – bare branches and dead grass on the other. But now, I have to compensate by collecting fragments and by blowing them all out of proportion.

John Burroughs makes a drama of this annual process: “We are eager for Winter to be gone,” he writes, “but he will not abdicate without a struggle. Day after day he rallies his scattered forces, and night after night pitches his white tents on the hills, and would fain regain his lost ground; but the young prince in every encounter prevails. Slowly and reluctantly the gray old hero retreats up the mountain, until finally the south rain comes in earnest, and in a night he is dead.”

In the skirmishes of early March, I unfairly watch for the isolated standards of resurrection: white tips of the snowdrops, the first crocus leaves, daffodils an inch high. If I were to judge by the appearance of the land around them, I would have little hope. But I remember that “each thing is a half.” I cheat, knowing the code of half: Everything is also whole.

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