Regardless

            The plants that push up through the junk and the plastic, earlier, later, they’re coming,
              regardless...

… the light shifts regardless.

The truth is a kind of regardless.

The winter’s nothing to me.

Do you think I don’t know about power? You think I was born green?

I was.

… I’ll blow down that tree so it cracks your roof open. I’ll carpet your house with the
                    river.

But I’ll be the reason your own sap’s reviving. I’ll mainline the light to your veins.

What’s under your road surface now?

What’s under your house’s foundations?

What’s warping your doors?

What’s giving your world the fresh colours? What’s the key to the song of the bird?
                      What’s forming the beak in the egg?

What’s sending the thinnest of green shoots through that rock so the rock
            starts to split?                                                                           Ali Smith, Spring

Flying back to Tasmania from the mainland right at the start of the month, by the time the plane has reached the halfway point it already lumbers and bucks in the turbulence of a storm blowing from vast disturbances over the Antarctic. And as I travel, I know that below and around me, the first of the swallows and last of the pardalotes are travelling too, heading home to nest, and so are cuckoos and swamp harriers and fantails and swift parrots and all the others that have overwintered in the warmth. In the ocean below, the whales are heading to their summer feeding grounds in the Antarctic.

I arrive on the island to flooding rain and gale force winds that, combined, soften the ground so that all over the state, trees come down blocking roads and breaking powerlines. In the cold dark we light candles and gather around the fire. Three, four, five days pass before our electricity is reconnected and others wait much longer. Our neighbours offer us a loan of their generator so that for a few hours we can give the freezer a boost and we don’t lose the food stored there.

Eventually the storm subsides. Wild gusts have blown open the first leaf buds on the birches and hawthorns and oaks, and on the walnut and chestnut trees, and the rains bring a flush of new growth to the eucalypts of the forest canopy, and the wattles and exocarpus and goodenia of the understorey. The pardalotes begin their nesting work. Further storms follow, bringing southerly and southwesterly gales day after day, cold, with rain that turns to sleet and wet snow now and then.

Sun appears in brief flashes. It rains and rains and rains. In nighttime breaks in cloud, a great punted football of a moon lobs up over the horizon and sails low across the northern sky. Solar storms bring auroras, pearly iridescences that struggle to compete with the moon as it inflates. Flotillas of freezing clouds raft up from the southern ocean in squall on squall.

At the equinox, the fiercest windstorm of the season blows branches sideways like hair – the trees look excited in the thrashing air, frenetic as a mosh pit. Once again there are trees down, roads cut, wires broken. Small animals don’t like it; they crouch nervously and don’t come out to eat while they can’t hear what’s hunting them. Afterwards there’s huge quiet. Everything looks polished, leaves shining, soft new grass all combed one way. A brown bandicoot comes to dig the lawn for worms, intent, eating hungrily; when she lifts a back leg to scratch her side I see the soft bulge of her pouch – she’s not just feeding herself.

One of our two roosters goes missing – he sometimes leads the flock out into the open, and the eagle pair that nests across the river have been over this way as usual with this year’s youngster. They may have grabbed him. Midnights and the small hours of the morning are a lot quieter without the cockerels yelling at each other.

In the paddock, the old pear trees open their curved beaks, hands, eyes of blossom and the whole tree becomes a bird-and-insect soundscape; quinces and apples and cherries flower too. In places the blossom only appears on the thinnest twig-tips because ringtail possums and parrots have stripped the branches that could hold their weight.

I go walking with F on a track that winds through bush along a cliff edge looking east into the sheltered waterway between the mainland of Tasmania and the archipelago of islands and peninsulas that lie along the southeast coast. The track begins on the beach; when I arrive wind is whipping sand into mini-tornadoes of grit through which dedicated joggers still run, head down, and dogs continue their joyous, prancing, ball-chasing celebrations. But as soon as we start the climb, we’re sheltered by forest, out of the roar. In the understorey, pink heath and clematis and blue love are flowering.

But not sheltered from the howl of grief and anger that goes up around the world; cities and their populations firebombed; communities flooded in Myanmar, the US, Japan, Eastern Europe, Nepal. I remember decades ago when the first climate change models began to be talked about, it was through that effects would be widely felt by about 2020 – and it’s happening, things heating on every level. Sometime there will be respite, but for now we’re in the storm.

The plants shift beneath you regardless, the people in sweatshops, the people out shopping, the people at desks in the light of their screens or scrolling their phones in the surgery waiting rooms, the protestors shouting, wherever, whatever the city or country, the light shifts, the flowers nod next to the corpseheap and next to the places you live and the places you drink yourselves stupid or happy or sad and the places you pray to your gods and the big supermarkets, the people on motorways speeding past verges and scrubland like nothing is happening. Everything is. The flowerheads open all over the flytip. The light shifts across your divides, round the people with passports, the people with money, the people with nothing, past sheds and canals and cathedrals, your airports, your graveyards, whatever you bury, whatever you dig up to call it your history or drill down to use up for money, the light shifts regardless.     
                                                                                                                    Ali Smith, Spring.

Reference

Ali Smith. Spring. Pantheon, 2019, pp. 7–9