Sunlight has increased rapidly since the mid-winter, with our spring’s weather cycling through warmth and renewed cold and snow, the light slowly warming the Earth and bringing forth the hardy growth of delicate late winter and early spring plants. Moss on our backyard steps, thick from moisture and years of shadowy cold, continues to wear down the stone and brick, turning that which is not alive into the rich earth that will foster all life.

The warming Earth has given beauty amongst the bleak remains of winter: blue and purple Miniature Irises, purple Crocuses, yellow and purple Hellebores, and a few yellow Daffodils all blossomed with the fragile hopes of spring, followed by a couple of days of heavy snow and cold. The snow, heavy on the flowers and other plants of early spring, lasted only a couple of days, receding as the expanding sunlight continued to bring warmer days.

As the sunlight melted the snow, light purple Periwinkle, an abundance of white and yellow Daffodils and white, yellow, and purple Hellebores blossomed, along with wonderfully fragrant white Hyacinths that my wife cut and brought into our house to fill it with the sweet smell of spring. Then, as surely as night follows day, another cold snap followed, coating the wealth of flowers with a dusting of freezing snow. Winter waned, but like the outgoing tide, returned to the Earth again and again in slowly declining waves.

In the warmth that followed, pinkish purple creeping phlox blossomed among the hard and dry bricks of our retaining wall, a reminder of the beauty that the rugged Earth offers us. Bluish purple Violets and Grape Hyacinths burst forth with the renewing growth in our garden, along with bright yellow Tulips glowing in the still-long shadows of early Spring. Meanwhile, in our long-neglected garden, sprouts of heirloom Red Romaine and Grandpa Admire’s lettuces grew from the cool ground, abundant in the cool but warming Earth.

Ramps growing on the hillside behind our home and wild chives growing in clumps in the hollow at the bottom of the hill, grew rapidly in the early spring. We gathered them and added butter and cheese from Ohio, along with our homemade Concord wine, to make our springtime Appalachian French Onion Soup, a rich warming soup from the cool Earth’s gifts.

In the warmth and longer days of spring, I wandered the hollow behind our home whenever I had the time, appreciating the years of growth of trees we have planted there. In the field we have planted several live Christmas trees, watching them grow into the future, adding their essential gifts to the Earthly river of life that will determine the future of all of humanity and the natural world.

While the Earth has slowly, in waves, renewed itself in the warming light, our family and community have continued to grow and change. My wife and I have continued to have the joyous privilege of caring for my stepdaughter’s daughter each week, with my wife bearing most of the work while I have done support work, running errands, caring for the darling girl while my wife naps, and helping with odds and ends.

Our granddaughter has embraced the work we do in her play and activity, insisting on peeling her own eggs, buttering her bread, and helping us make meals as best as she can. Continuing a tradition she began last year with planting Money Plants and Beans in our garden, she has enthusiastically helped with sowing seeds in the garden, including peas, spring greens like Arugula, Spinach, and Kale, Radishes, Beets, Carrots, and Turnips, the last three with children of a neighbor. The children—another three-year-old like our granddaughter and a six-year-old sister—eagerly helped turn the soil, remove the remaining weeds, and sow the seeds in the rows. Their young selves, wanting to learn the traditions of their elders, made their play the essential work we elders do to contribute the flow of life into eternity.

During the last week, a friend who has been an essential and tireless part of the local food club, offered to let us take peach trees a friend of hers dug up from his compost pile. The good works that she and I have shared rewarded us with a pair of robust peach trees which will, if my family is fortunate, provide luscious fruit to us for years to come. Built on the partnership of good works, our human communities share the practice of good works of natural communities—what scientists call the symbiotic relationships of ecosystems.

Meanwhile, in the larger human world, violent men arose from the depths of horrors of the pandemic and sought refuge from the reality of that hardship with vainglory seeking of military conquest at all costs. Seeking to turn the good works of our communities against their “enemies”, violent men have divided the human communities of good works for millennia, creating longstanding hatreds between people to gain short-lived dynasties and empires. Such vast hierarchies of power-over, seemingly invincible in their moments of “glory”, inevitably tumble to dust as the consequences of harm catches up to the violent men at the top of the hierarchies.

Though the violent men in our communities may be enamored with the false promises of their violent leaders, they become exhausted by needless wars and suffering for their god-kings, leaving their self-worshipping leaders without the support needed to continue the endless wars. So, it appears that both the foot soldiers of the US and Russian empires have become exhausted after decades of senseless and needless wars, causing the US to be routed in recent years from the US empire’s foreign commitments and the Russian conscripts, longing more for home and peace than conquest, have confounded their power-overful oligarchs with a faint-hearted invasion that has been forced onto them. In doing so, the pathological Russian leader, only believing in power-over and cruelty, has sowed the seeds of his own undoing. Such is the fate of leaders who stray too far from the essential practice of good works.

It is easy, as someone in this country, to stand with the victims of a traditional enemy’s aggression. The violent men and the sensitive people in our country can easily agree on a common enemy and a common hero. It is not so easy for sensitive people in Russia to speak out against the evil their power-overful leaders do—violent men strike out against them with heartless fury. Likewise, it has not been easy for sensitive people in the United States to speak out against aggression in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America, and many other regions where the US’s power-overful leaders have sought to use our communities of good works against their communities of good works.

In the Earth’s progression through eons, communities of good works have formed and maintained life flowing into unfathomable futures filled with offspring, warm spring days, and abundance amidst the challenges of mortal life. As sensitive people, activists, and others who resist our community being used against the people of other communities, we face the twin tasks of taking part in the slowly evolving Earthly flow of life into the future while lessening our connections to the violence against innocent people, whether the aggressors are traditional enemies of our government or in our own government, ethnoreligious group, or class.

Simply attempting to create a safe space for women, children, ethnic, religious, immigrant, and other minorities in our own communities may seem an endless task, but, like the growth of evergreens through the seasons of the Earth, there has been growing strength in recent generations. Relishing our families and communities among the hard and cold stone of mortal life lies perhaps the most important solution to the woes of the larger human world. Setting aside the distractions of the larger human world to embrace and nurture those in our families and communities lies the strength of the moss turning hard cold stone into life-giving Earth.