The Radiant Ascent

Choosing roses over rage

The world so often demands our rage. It traffics in it really. There is a vast market for despair in our wounded world, and business is good. Open social media or the news any day of the week and a thousand talking heads will tell you that your dreams are too lofty, that the conditions aren’t right, that the odds are insurmountable, that you should give up. Rage bait, fake news, and videos doctored, edited, designed with the sole intent of making you mad.

It’s not new. Even before the internet, cable news was built on fear and anger. Before then, the newspapers and tabloids were all too happy to dehumanize the national enemy of the week. It’s universal, ancient, seductive. It is so easy to hand your frustrations, your grief, your rage to the false confessors on the screen and page and in exchange be told there is nothing you can do.

There it is.

An answer.

An end.

An emotional opiate oblivion that requires no effort from you beyond your continued attention.

A snipping of the headlines from a major news outlet. You know what they say, “if it bleeds, it leads.”

I implore you: reject these opiate peddlers and their imbalance.

Then again, it is the time of year to perhaps reflect on imbalance: consider the vast imbalance of light and dark, the final slow ascent to the summer solstice when time seemingly stands still in the warm good-light of June. If the wounded material world wants you to be angry, the constantly-regenerating natural world wants you to be wreathed in a long lasting light that surpasses the limits of the day. Walk through any field in the eastern United States on a warm night when the crickets are chirping, the bats are weaving their strange flight overhead, and the air is thick. That is when you can see the fireflies phase in and out of the dark as if they were immune to time, as if they did not quite contort to the laws of physics, as if they transcend somehow this material plane and its sorrows. We know this is not truly the case; fireflies do not blink in and out of existence. Despite this, it is hard to accept that they are fully of this world. Their bodies are literally radiant, they appear at the strange dusky twilight time between day and night, and they seem to really only love the places where the forests meet the fields, the tree line. They are creatures that live in the liminal space, happiest between worlds.

“The Fireflies” Henri-Camille Danger, 1896.

You, however, are very much of this world, for better or for worse. Here in our profane neon noise factory, you seek and find beauty in the obvious places humanity has largely forgotten: the forests, the fields, the sea, the wide plains, the cool mountains. I say these places are largely forgotten because although we know of them, we continue to be lured to the golden roar of the cities and all their temptations. We are becoming a people who know of the green places but who do not know them.

These are the good places to be on a languid summer day, and you are in the thick of it now, this good summer. You know it by many marks, not least of which its roses. The beach roses come first here, and they are very forgiving over what exactly constitutes a beach. You may just as soon find them on a beach in Nantucket as you would by a pond in Vermont! They were brought to North America in the 19th century from Asia for not only their ornamentation but their resilience in coastal areas where they can be exposed to salt water spray. Their fruit, the rosehip, which seems to be loved and maligned in equal measure, is used to make everything from pie to wine. My personal favorite memory of these summer-heralds however came to me while bringing my daughter to the lake near our home. Smell has a way of inducing memory in us, and the sweet smell of the lakeside beach roses reminded me of my own childhood summers hurling the little fruits at the other boys in an attempt to score little welts on each other in mock wars around the swimming hole. Yes, despite its vast medicinal utility, the fruit of the beach rose retains a status in my heart as excellent ammunition for plucky youths who want to engage in a little mischief but do not want to cause the damage a stone would bring.

A beach rose in our yard. No filter, no editing.

Perhaps there is a lesson here amongst the fireflies, beach roses, and long June days. In a world that constantly demands our rage, we do not have the luxury of the firefly in its liminal space to blink between this world and the next. We do have the opportunity, however, to choose a rosehip over a stone, and to be a little more playful in a world that can make us very angry…

…if we allow it.