Beltane Early Growth Moon
I walked through the garden alone, while the dew was still on the beet seedlings and apple 
blossoms. Oh, wait. That was roses, wasn’t it, from the old gospel tune.
If you want a moment of intense spirituality, go out in the morning, after a big rain, heat just beginning to soak into the soil, smell the odor of sanctity, in this case fertility, coming up from the plants and their medium, see the beets and kale and carrots and cucumbers and sugar snap peas on the rise, look at the onions and garlic and leeks filling out, getting greener, taller and fatter. Take a stroll past the cherry blossoms, the pear and plum blossoms, the apple blossoms that came out yesterday, past the bee colony hard at work, over to the blueberries and check out the new growth on the hard pruned wild grapes. The sand cherries and quince and even the currants with their modest, tiny green flowerettes, all showing to the bees their best and sweetest offerings. Each petal, each flower, each stalk, each leaf is a miracle, a wonder of the evolutionary path on which that particular organism travels, its genetic ancientrail.
(our quince)
That walk, by the way, is 
not the walk of an individual, self-reliant and independent, but of a dependent creature glorying in the symbiotic relationship between his cells and these plants. This is a community enterprise, the humans here, Kate and I, in partnership with the vegetables, the flowers, the fruit, the bees.
(our honeycrisp tree in bloom)
Which reminds me of the other partners, or co-habitaters at least, all the wild animals that live in the soil here, the gophers and earth worms and grubs and snails and voles, those who use the trees the squirrels, the woodpeckers, pileated and red-tailed, crows, hawks, Great Horned owls, robins, chickadees, blue birds, those who live on the land, under buildings and in brush piles the rabbits, chipmunks, woodchucks, opossums, raccoons, mice, the interlopers the wild 
turkeys, the deer, the coyote. And of course, the woods themselves the ironwood trees, the poplar, ash, cottonwood, red oak, burr oak, cedar, spruce, yes even the black locust and the buckthorn. The grass, yes, the dogwood yes, the amur maples yes, the alicanthus yes.
(a baby opossum in a dead tree in our woods)
We all share this land, to which we have the deed, but so little else. When Kate and I leave, as we will one way or the other, the rest will continue, unaffected, unmoved by our passing. Land is not for owning, but for cohabitation. We know this, if we bother to look.