A Dance of Love

Robert Brady, Claude at Blogging in Paris, and Chancy have all written recently about the pollen or yellow desert dust or air born stuff and in some cases the resultant allergies. Their posts brought a recent but slightly different image and experience to my mind.

Twice in the past few years while hiking I have experienced what to me was a special and marvelous event. It was unexpected, quiet, and very subtle; and had I been looking the wrong way, I would have missed it. I probably had missed it many other times in my life. The first time I saw this natural phenomena was on a hike in the Colorado Rockies. We had just crossed a ridge and somewhat out of breath had paused just below the crest to look down into the next valley of firs and pines and junipers. It was a quiet spring day except for the call of the jays and the occasional spring breeze that touched the evergreen branches.

I was staring at the tops of dozens of elegant pine trees. Then just below their tops, and without warning, a puff of yellow dust covering yards of space flew from one tree drifting like tiny sparks of life down the valley and across the other trees. Less then one second later the next tree released its pollen and so on down through the valley just like a wave of golden phosphorescence. The magic was in the timing and the silence. It was clandestine and confidential as if I was observing the lovemaking between the trees, which in a sense, I was.

I observed this same phenomena when I was in the desert in Arizona recently. We were hiking back into the valley and paused to gaze back at the trail while standing under an Arizona pine tree. Then just above my head the pine tree released a golden shower across the area. The thing I noticed this time was there was no breeze, no air movement that I could feel although clearly the air was moving above my head. I touched the pine branch above my head to see if I could release more pollen and nothing, not one little spore, was released.

I did some research on the process and the science indicates that there is "no explosive dehiscence" in the process. Maybe not, but they "talk" to each other in some way. It is some dance of love that we cannot understand and it is sacred when you see it.