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Yes, There"s Such a Thing as a Good Silent Spring

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In 1962 Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was published, a book warning against the environmental dangers posed by DDT, a pesticide that wrought havoc in the bird community. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was right: a spring without chirping birds truly would remain spring in name only. The present article's intent is to serve not as a warning of the imminent demise of bird populations, however, but rather as a gentle reminder: listening to the birds should take precedence over your spring landscaping chores.

For in this fast-paced 21st century in which we live, one needs to be reminded to silence the bustle of everyday living long enough to listen to the birds of spring.

When the spring equinox arrives, you know that there are landscaping chores you must soon perform in order to ready the landscape for the new growing season. But before becoming absorbed in your landscaping chores, a word about the celebration of a silent spring is in order -- where "silent spring" is to be taken in a much different vein than in Rachel Carson's book. For without a sense of the sacredness of this fleeting season of birds and spring peepers, the landscaping chores on your checklist will be just so much more work you have to do. Backyard fun (including an appreciation of nature) must trump backyard maintenance.

We must go beyond Rachel Carson's environmental plea and dig down to her core message, a message that would be just as relevant in a world without pollution. Viewed from that perspective, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring should cry out to us, "Listen to the singing birds; don't take them for granted!

Drink in the serenity that they offer!" Serenity is not serendipitous -- you have to make yourself receptive to it. Serenity begins by slowing down and honoring quiet time.

Working on home landscaping chores, unfortunately, can all too easily become merely an extension of your work week at the office -- do this chore, do that chore, keep the old nose to the grindstone.... You must silence this nervous activity, give your senses permission to absorb the sights and sounds of the season. Better for the landscaping chores to go undone than to lose out on spring's ephemeral gifts.

Vegetation is charmingly tenuous and tentative in early spring. Lawn grass has yet to make the first of its incessant demands to be mowed. Trees bear only the promises of leaves to come. The spring-flowering bulbs and other early risers know that, in northern climes, they can still be put back to bed at any time by a fresh blanket of snow.

Early spring is a magical and tempestuous time of year, unlike summer when nature becomes more set in its ways. Early spring is the year's childhood. Celebrate it faithfully by refusing to miss the changes on the landscape, just as you would refuse to miss a human child's first utterance or first faltering steps.

I feel more than a little remiss if I miss any of the changes spring brings, simply for the sake of completing some arbitrary landscaping chores. Why did I let the red-wing blackbird's greeting trill be drowned out by vehicular noise, instead of absorbing its thrilling notes on a silent spring stroll? Was I really too busy to stop and be serenaded by the spring peepers? Why didn't I stop to admire the unfurling of the skunk cabbage's greenery, behind which leprechauns lurked when I was a boy? How could I have allowed the pussy willows to leaf out without even once stroking their precocious furry catkins?

Henry David Thoreau makes the point as only he can, writing in the chapter of Walden entitled, "Spring":

 
One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in. The ice in the pond at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer.... I am on the alert for the first signs of spring....

 

Those are the words of a man who knew how to enjoy a "silent spring."
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