I see the little changes even now this mid-January. The lateral leaf buds on the roses are beginning to swell up now partly because the the canes have been reduced by at least half. All good rosarians prune roses in January. This allows the plant energy to go downward into the roots, thereby forming a well of power for the leaves and blossoms to come. Plant energy must return to the earth to be re-manifested in leafage and flowering. This January, again, I bought two new roses; "Mr. Lincoln," and " Peace". As I look through the bare-root rose bins, I muse on the futility of assigning names to roses. I try to forget their names as soon as possible, and more recently I do! What is a name compared to the qinitessentially feminine of fleshy rose petals and their redolent scent--that mysterious enclosing vortex of of deep, yearning beauty to which Yeats and Rilke wrote poetic witness. How can a plastic plant tag evoke feeling? All poetry and creativity of any sort is praise of the feminine because creativity comes to the poet through the warm soul-embracing hands of the Muse. And, believe me, we are not entitled to it nor are we self-annointed. It is a matter of waiting and Grace---
And so, the planting and growing of roses is natural, as the Earth is the source of the Sophianic as Robert Sardello explains with skill, clarity, and intelligence. So, in taking care of our gardens and our plants, we express care and feeling for the earth. Every time I dig a hole into the earth to plant a rose, I evoke Sophia.
January is named for Janus, the god who faces both ways. Usually, his double-faced visage is placed over arches through which people pass. I thought about this phenomenom as I stood one wintry, bright sunny day on the Via Appia Antiqua, that ancient Roman road, The Appian Way, that leads out into the farthest ends of the Roman Empire. The massive oaks (leafage like live oaks) were still in green leaf, and the earth was strewn with their fallen acorns about to burst into growth. I collected a few as I always do when there are seeds free for the taking. Evelyn and I stopped at a little, cozy, empty coffee stand where the women were ever so happy to chat in that friendly Italian manner. No one had come in all morning. We were all cold, but the warmth of true meeting kept us all warm, and I began to feel an uncanny atonement with those men who where marching out from the Roman "civilized" world as they knew it. I felt in a timeless moment: "What will I find out there, who and what will I see? What experiences will I bring back to Latium, if I am even fortunate ever to return alive?" As the Roman legions marched through the arches, they passed under Janus's two-face head as a potent reminder of transitional destiny.
Janus is the god who faces two ways, the god of the limen or threshhold. He is the god of doorways and gateways, entrances and exits. Which are which? The word "limen" signifies the bi-directional experience of Janus. Through doorways we pass, mostly, both ways. The image of the limen began far earlier than with the double faced Janus. Cardea, as Robert Graves tells us in "The White Goddess", is the goddess of the doorway and limen. She is both post and socket of the hinge that opens and closes both ways. A neat fit. Our lives are sequences of Cardea moments. When I think of the most significant turnings or events of my life, they all have the "ring" not the slam of Cardea's door; a circle life that could have gone either way, but the destiny of the future turned, swung, to me to make me what I am now.
As side note, and take it as you may, I find it touching that Samuel Palmer, the wonderful English, romantic painter always bowed down and kissed the threshold of William Blake's doorway as he entered Blake's work room. Knowing Palmer as I do from his ensouled paintings and drawings, I believe it, and I think that the story is truely given because of its source. I wish I could study and handle Palmer's work in the British Museum as did my brother Salvatore Joseph La Rosa, a sensitive, very fine and devoted artist.
Well, my garden is cleaned up, the shrubs and trees are trimmed. The kumquat fruits are starting to ripen, and warmth increases each day. I can explain that, but how do I tell you that there is a certain plumpness to the earth I walk upon, a kind of softness and springyness that my foot feels? But you know what I mean. The earth feels spongy and damp and alive, and the earthworms are making little mounds of pure earth-detritus. Even my red-eared water turtle Sempre peeps his beautifully enameled chartreuse eyes and green nose out of the water very early in the morning to see if the rising Sun tells him to crawl up on his rock. It is as though the water surface, the water line between his world and that of air through which he breaks momentarily is a liminal membrane-like lens (a meniscus) between his winter hibernaculum and Spring which always feels eternally new.
