(Needless to say, spoilers ahead)
“A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Vanity Fair has shared a sneak peek at the stage design for Sunday evening’s Oscars, revealing a stage featuring “scattered trees and a more organic feel to create a calming space in a chaotic world.”
Sounds perfect.
At a time when mortality seems to be knocking hard at our civilization’s door and our world is teetering on the edge of disaster, with environmental safeguards being blown away, bombs and gunfire spanning the continents and nukes in the hands of megalomaniacs, Oscar comes running to the rescue with a calming message.
We look around for spring’s promise and hope to see rushing waterfalls and returning geese, and what we are getting instead is burning refineries and outbreaks of measles. But fear not, the nominated movies are saying, order is about to be restored. Spring is indeed arriving, and with it nature’s regenerative kiss.
For Jews, the “Month of Spring” (as it’s literally called in the Torah1 - also called Nisan in subsequent literature) begins this Wednesday evening, meaning that Passover, the “Festival of Spring” (as it’s literally called), follows two weeks later. For people of many cultural and faith backgrounds, nature’s resurrection is at hand - which means humanity’s salvation might be too.
And Friday in my backyard, as if on cue, I saw the first snowdrops starting to bud.
It is customary to recite a special blessing when seeing blossoms of fruit trees for the first time during Nisan.
Translation by Rabbi David Seidenberg. See more details about this beautiful, life-affirming ritual in the pdf below.
See also this explanation and creative rituals by Rabbi Jill Hammer:
As Shakespeare wrote in Troilus and Cressida (Act III, Scene 3),
A number of this year’s nominated films, like the stage design for the awards broadcast, assist in reminding us of what is eternal and beautiful in our natural world, and what transcends the artificial boundaries of a single life - how nature and we can be immortal, if we can only begin to grasp our place in the grand scheme of things.
These films celebrate the potential for life beyond death, whether in the form of a living creature assembled from dead body parts (Frankenstein) or vampires recognizing the transcendent, restorative power of music (Sinners), or escapees from a Witness Protection Program ready to re-engage in life’s battles, confronting, yet again, an enduring evil (One Battle After Another) .
The heartbreaking nominated documentary All the Empty Rooms brings school shooting victims back to life, granting them a form of immortality, through photographs, trinkets, memories and even smells from their untouched bedrooms-turned-shrines - while granting their parents an ounce of comfort from their never-ending grief. We see grieving parents in Hamnet too, where immortal words of the Bard arise like a phoenix following the death of his son.
In Train Dreams, my personal favorite, we witness the extraordinary impact of a completely ordinary life. We see a man with no parents and no living kin, his years filled with brief, intense love and incalculable grief, finding comfort through a deepening connection with the world around him.
In that film’s last scene, the protagonist, Robert Grainier, who had spent much of his life cutting down trees, gets a tree’s eye view of the world while riding on a single engine plane doing figure-8s in the sky, and that new perspective enables him to look back at his life.
The narrator picks it up from there:
When Robert Grainier died in his sleep sometime in November of 1968, his life ended as quietly as it had begun. He’d never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone. He had no idea who his parents might have been, and he left no heirs behind him.
But on that spring day, as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all.
I loved this simple film about a simple man, because it presents us with a view of life that is so necessary right now, a stark contrast from what we read in the news. At a time when the world is being run by megalomaniacs who think that they and they alone steer the currents of history, we discover, instead, that what matters is how we forge connections with everyone and everything around us, and it is from the strength of those connections that we sanctify life and can transcend mortality.
The lone-wolf-narcissist will die alone and be gone. The everyman from the log cabin will be embraced by the landscape that he cultivated and pruned.
The director, Clint Bentley, wrote:
“Robert Granier leads a simple life. He has a family, finds work where he can, and, when his life ends, he leaves behind no real record he was even here. If he made any impact on the course of history, it was small - just a pebble thrown in a river. And yet he led a profound and beautiful life.
With this film, I wanted to celebrate the magic and the beauty of the everyday. So often we’re either worrying about or chasing some future that may or may not come. We often forget that while we’re doing that, our life is happening all around us. All of these little moments that seem so simple - a quiet morning with our family, dinner with a friend - these moments come to define our life and give meaning to our time here.”
The very first camera movement in Train Dreams takes us all onto a tree for a trunk’s eye view as it falls in a forest. No one is there to hear. So, as the old conundrum goes, if a tree falls in a movie and no person is in the shot, does it really fall?
Not only does it fall, but it makes an enormous crash, and the camera vibrates with shockwaves that reverberate on the forest floor, and everything in its landing zone is changed irrevocably. The camera brings us into this Goliath’s experience of its own downfall. We become the tree. (It’s at about 4:30 of this clip below).
Trees are key characters of this film (and none were harmed in its production, we are told). Toward the end of his life, Granier, already grieving the loss of his wife and daughter, meets a National Parks naturalist named Claire Thompson, also grieving a recent loss, who shares these rapid-fire pearls of wisdom that outline the film’s main message:
“In the forest,” she tells him, “every last thing’s important. It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins if you really look at it. The dead tree is as important as the living one. There must be something for us to learn from that2
The little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river.3
And then she adds a line that resonated with me on a most personal level: The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.4
So many priceless bits of wisdom in just a few lines. This is not a verbose film. Words are almost incidental to the visual impact.
Hamnet’s first scene also zeroes in on the centrality of trees. We meet Agnes, who will later marry Will, as she lies curled up in a fetal position beneath a mossy, ancient tree where, later in the film, she gives birth. She is seen as an outgrowth of this landscape, one with the world around her. The tree, with its dark, hollowed-out roots and gaping hole at its base that appears to be a passage to the underworld, serves as a place of transition between life and death.
That same forest imagery comes back into play later on, as the cloth backdrop for the production of Hamlet at the film’s recreation of the Globe Theater.
One other nominated film touches on our relationship to nature, and the consequences of our abusing it. It’s Bugonia, which many consider to be a climate change parable. It has to do with bees, and that’s all I’ll say about that.
A salute to one of America’s great naturalists
And so we have arrived at the doorstep of spring. Let me celebrate that by sharing a few March poems by Aldo Leopold.
In 1949, a small book was published that revolutionized the environmental movement. When I read it in college, it certainly changed my life. In Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold collected his nature writings into a year-long diary, bringing us in tune with the rhythms of the seasons in his native Wisconsin. The book was published just after he died, ironically while fighting a wildfire. Nature’s beauty and its cruelty were felt most acutely by this conservationist, who defined ecology as the “science of relationship” and understood that our relationship to the Land is the most fundamental of all.
With so many urgent concerns swirling around these days, from war to immigration to health care, it is too easy to neglect that increasingly dark cloud of climate change that is a looming emergency. Somehow, this NASA webpage (below) is still standing (Shhh - Don’t tell anyone), which details the unequivocal evidence of the accelerating warming and its human causes.
As one of the last century’s great environmentalists, Aldo Leopold had no idea where things were heading. He reminds us of simpler times. So does the Jewish calendar, which places the annual celebration of our national rebirth squarely in line with nature’s. The Jewish calendar places Jews right in the front row of nature’s miraculous blessings.
Here are some memorable passages from Leopold’s work:
The Geese Return
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring. A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.
A March Morning
A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese...Once the first geese are in, they honk a clamorous invitation to each migrating flock, and in a few days the marsh is full of them.
Wild Things
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot....Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.
And finally, as I wish you a happy spring this week and Oscar night on Sunday, here’s an excerpt from John Denver’s Seasons Suite
Open up your eyes and see the brand new day, the clear blue sky and brightly shining sun.
Open up your ears and hear the breezes say: “everything that’s cold and gray is gone.”
Open up your hands and feel the rain come down,
taste the wind and smell the flowers’ sweet perfume.
Open up your mind and let the light come in, the earth has been reborn and life goes on.
Do you care what’s happening around you? Do your senses know the changes when they come?
Can you see yourself reflected in the seasons? Can you understand the need to carry on?
Riding on the tapestry of all there is to see, so many ways and oh, so many things.
Rejoicing in the differences, there’s no one just like me.
Yet as different as we are, we’re still the same.
And oh, I love the life within me, I feel a part of everything I see.
And oh, I love the life around me, a part of everything is here in me.
A part of everything is here in me, a part of everything is here in me.
Spring Month:
My take on those lines:
Dead trees live on beyond their natural lifespans, whether as food and shelter for animals, or your butcher block kitchen table. Similarly, the impact of our lives goes far beyond our expiration date.
Even the least significant creature can make all the difference. The Talmud (Gittin 56b) tells a story of how it was the measly gnat who brought down the great Roman emperor Titus, and it lists five examples of how a smaller creature can bring down a more significant one (Shabbat 77b). Similarly, while Robert’s life might have had the hisorical impact of a pebble thrown in a river, in a profound way, every pebble matters.
The world needs a hermit in the woods every bit as much as a preacher in the pulpit. Why? The response is: Just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for.
And then, in the next scene, Robert experiences his daughter returning to his cabin, injured and near death. While it is doubful that it really happened, what is real is his decision to live out his life alone, in his rebuilt cabin, just in case his wife and daughter return. And he lives out a profoudly connected life even though he is totally alone.
