Dancing on Bear Ground it’s a cool, moist, green, morning in mid-March on the Mayacamas walking along the mowed roadside we’re greeted by the bright pink flowers … of weedy little storks-bills all facing the sun, their color reminds us of shooting star flowers heading down thru abandoned pasture toward an old oak grove, we look for some native wildflowers … between the annual grass seedlings and straw we find bright pink blooms of cut-leaved geranium from the old world the flower color and round leaves evoke a teasing faint memory of checker-blooms between big old bunch-grass bunches looking, looking and looking for wildflowers … in acres of annual grass seedlings and straw with weeds we find only 5 individual native plants entering the woods we walk past many small young oaks then reach a small grove of stunningly large oaks, one after another, each bigger yet, we sit and lunch in the shade of the largest (she is older than the oldest road in the region!) “grandmother, we thank you for good company and for the shade” after lunch we head down through a big patch of annual grassland churned over by pigs all the soil bared here, we imagine grizzly bears churning up the ground between ancient bunch-grasses bears digging for bulbs and mice bears …. ‘bear’ing the soil between the bunches ‘bear’ ground a seed-bed for new bulbs and biodiversity anchored by the bunch-grasses here we imagine bears … wading in waves of wild hyacinth a… blue … wildflower … sea waves cresting with bunch-grass tassels foam of tidy tips and popcorn flowers splashings of bird’s-eye gilia of lupine, the air aswarm with a hundred kinds of native bees and butterflies bears …. bearing the soil between the bunches bear ground a seed-bed for new bulbs and a riot of wildflowers between the bunches are runways for mice and lizards, churnings of gophers, each leaving their own wake, a patchwork … of tiny … tended, tilled and trampled places, their activity shaping small spaces for flowers and bees … bee-grounds … for … nesting, today a single wild hyacinth waves at a few passing woodland satyrs today we hike thru depleted former pasture and wonder ‘where have all the wildflowers gone?’ crossing the ravine, we pass through young oak woodland with annual grasses and a scattering of small new bunch grass babies that haven’t grown bunchy accompanied by a sparse sprinkling of wildflowers rejoining the road, we’re held-up at the first road bank by a gang of shooting stars a few buttercups spread into the nearby grasslands and sleepy milkmaids follow the road, their heads drooping scarlet larkspur will soon bloom on a steep roadcut seedlings of Chinese Houses and Clarkia’s promise later blooms on these roadcuts too a few more curves and we blink at a crowd of baby blue-eyes blinking back from another bank and we wonder, can we bring these wildflowers away from the roadsides and back into the grasslands … again? let’s try to bring them back let’s gather seeds let’s bring these ancient partners … back … into the dance let’s bring the patterns rhythms synergies … together? let’s give a handful of wildflowers seeds to deer-mouse to jumping mouse so they can cache and plant them together with mouse pellets filled with spores of their favorite fungi people, the bears, the mice each carrying seeds and fungi let’s come together, squirrels too, and birds, each … carrying seeds and spores let’s come together native bees, butterflies let’s come together bunch-grasses and bears, hyphae and wildflowers… let’s come back together and dance let’s sing let’s relearn the rhythms and dance with bears, bulbs, bees, butterflies, buttercups let’s sing and dance with the beauty of it let’s’ sing and dance … together … again!
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