We need to sense green life. Especially in the winter. When I come home from my evening class then, I pause by the kitchen counter at my collection of small plants under a long plant light. I set my book bag down and gaze at the button fern, refined and sturdy, the maidenhair un-coiling green curls from its satisfying, wirey black stem. In a homemade Wardian case the leaf of a fancy begonia sprouts tiny new plants from each cut in the leaf vein.
But it isn’t wonders that keep me there; it’s simply the sensation of green. I feel it in some somatic core, as you feel clear water quench a serious thirst. “What have you been doing in the kitchen for the past hour?” says Leonard Deen when I come into the living room. “An hour?” I’m surprised. “I was just looking at the plants.”
Leisurely summer weeding gives the same pleasure of purely touching green. You go out to some morning-shaded spot, perhaps with your morning cup in hand. A few weeds have got a nice green start, and you sit down to pull them out, one by one: root—hairy and delicate, still clinging to the good soil—stem and greeny leaves. The oriole keeps up his always-incomplete assertion. You’re down in the green, tranquil and balanced. What you do will not be undone in the next twenty minutes. The weed green passes into your hands and into your soma.
The plants you free gain ground and their own greenness. They articulate themselves more, up there in the light; but you’re enjoying the dumbness of the simple, single green. You are one with the weeds not with your plants now. It’s a dialectical oneness, of course, because you’re sorting out and throwing away: “This is true; this is not true.” But it’s the dialectics of poise not of struggle or heroism. You’re not laboring at something to get it over with, but acting on each part with the energizing patience of green.
Of course there are nongreen places in the great world, where sky and air are everything, or rock and height. And there are greener worlds than mine which may be almost enough to satisfy the need for green. Once in the south of England, during a June vacation of almost constant rain, Leonard and I found ourselves back of Winchester Cathedral looking at a sign that said, “Water meadow walk to Saint Cross. One mile.” Until we saw the sign we hadn’t known we wanted to go to Saint Cross, whatever that was. The usual gentle rain was falling. We set out along a single-person path beside a small stream flowing clearly over light brown gravel through what was presumably the water meadow. The grass was over our heads. It was a world of never-ending grass; all the cattle of the sun couldn’t have consumed it. There was no one about, and no other world than this.
The stream gradually grew a little bigger, supported a few water fowl and a few fish. Our feet wet on the path, our heads wet in the green watery air, it was hard to tell the one water from the other. The green of the water grasses seemed simply expressed into the green rain above them. Leonard realized this was the Itchen, whose stained-glass image we had just seen in the Silksteed chapel with Isaak Walton sitting pensively by the banks where we walked now. Occasionally we saw a house with its own small bridge over the stream and its own locked bridge gate—through the stream was hardly a barrier and could be stepped across easily. The houses appeared remote in the watery air, but in the garden of one I saw a woman with an umbrella picking lettuces.
Saint Cross turned out to be an old, small, empty monastery. Its attendant asked us whether we required bread and ale after our journey, as he was bound to give it to travelers who asked for it. “Do you really give it?” I asked. “Do you ask for it?” he replied. We hadn’t the temer- ity to ask. We wandered through old rooms. There were a few tools and kitchen implements, but mostly the rooms were filled simply with Corot light, watery and clear. When we left, the attendant was gone, but I noticed a sign on the desk which said his name was Mr. Heaven. Then we went back through the green water meadow as we had come. In the train on the way back to London, as I got out the extra pair of dry socks I always carried in England, I felt it had been a satisfying day.
Green, as it happens, is my most unfavorite color. I mean the green one is offered in wall paint, rugs, sofas, and dress goods. It discomforts me. Leonard pretends to find this amusing as he sees me come in from one of my watering forays into the tomato plants growing higher than my head. “If green is your most unfavorite color, then why are there leaves growing in your hair?” he says, plucking them out and placing them greenly in my hand.
