The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass Page B

runnels from the lip of the candles at my writing desk, out in my cabin as I work far into the night, at the edge of the winter-silent marsh, is the same as the crenellations of ice that creep down over the eaves of this same cabin (warmed by those candles, and my breath, and the dim little glow of the wood stove); it's the same translucent, moonstruck filigree of ice, not wax, leaning in past the frost-spangled window.
    Everywhere I look, some months, and particularly, it seems, when in the womb of ice, the womb of winter, it is all almost the same, both pattern and image, dream and sensation. As if we are not quite ready for the furor and clamant wonder of the "true" or living world, the green world of living and dying, and must emerge into it slowly, like crocuses ourselves, or chunks of stone in a rock wall, reappearing above the surface and only gradually becoming enspirited, and animated.
    What dreamer dreamed us, that we might begin dreaming? Thank goodness that in these moments of our realization of a shimmering background
sameness
in the world there is so much beauty too, or we might all get incredibly bored with so much unity, really, at the heart or core of all things.
    Faced with the recognition of such sameness, our souls and spirits might abandon us, no longer needing the specificity of us; might fly right out the window if one day we lost the ability to look around and perceive the individual beauties attendant—like lace or fringes—to all this other sameness—the rest of the world's unchanging core or essence.
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    On the seventh of March, my birthday, the woods are all but silent. The laugh-out-loud sound has not yet returned: the sound of water running through the forest in sheets, water dripping from every branch, water dripping from the roof, a laughing, awakening sound. There is still only the nighttime hooting of owls, which begin their nesting so much earlier than any other bird. The bears are still sleeping, and all the forest's other creatures have not yet returned from their southward migrations, or have not been born yet—though it's very close now, with those first bare branches of the willows beginning to glow gold, like the upraised wands of so many orchestral conductors: the last moment of deep silence that builds and swells before the conductors stir their wands and summon that music.
    The golden orange wands are lifted and poised along every creek and river and beside every marsh, and at night, back in the forests, the owls are calling to an audience not yet arrived. I like to think that in the bellies of their mothers, the elk calves and deer fawns can hear these first summons and can understand too from the all-else stillness that surrounds them, the last of the stillness, that their time is coming soon, and that a world, a whole new world of song and movement and color and warmth, is being made for them; and that in their mind's eye, perhaps, or their other ways of knowing, they can already somehow see those uplifted bare branches, burning in the falling snow and spring rain like beautiful candles seen across a great distance.
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    Who knows how these things work, or where the dream begins? My grandfather, father, and one of my brother's sons all have the same birth date, October sixteenth. My oldest daughter came into this world only six days after my birthday. Is there a fraternity and sorority of time—of the days, seasons, years? The birth dates for me and my best friend are but two days apart. It goes on and on, such accountings, far beyond random coincidence. There are patterns all around us, above and below us—of that there can be no dispute. The only real question that seems to me worth wrestling over is whether they are designed or not.
    How could they not be?
    And here, perhaps, is blasphemy, though it is not intended as such. In the genius of the design, perhaps the beauty and elegance of the initial or developing organic system is what gave rise to