It's a fine February morning in a place where everything has icing on it. Bright white icing. It's a place of bright contrasts, especially at night. But I'm talking about now and here and it's all a little too bright and white for me.The sun on your back is like a distant bonfire, as well it should. But the trees are broken, the terrible elms that I was going to take down later this year, now they're all broken and I feel sorry for them... but in the spring somebody with a chain saw is going to have to cut them down. They'll grow back as a shrub for awhile.

But these extremes, these whites and darks and swollen birds all puffed and jumpy on the branches. This is like a charcoal drawing, and those things tend towards extremes. That always gets me thinking about the Tree, the One we wern't supposed to get to. Even the Gnostics had that Tree. The First Mother, the one even a Bonobo ape orphan will snuggle against, is the Tree. It starts out as One and then branches out into many. Sometimes that's a good idea, sometimes, it's not. But the Tree of Life splits into two, and then again, and again. Until we show up and name It. Sounds silly, I know, but in the end we have the Tree as a Past and as a Future. And sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's not.

Infinity looked at me and said, "That's what it's all about, this and that, dog and cat. That's what it looks like, more or less. That's my name, you can't help but spread it around." So I looked and found that it was true, every Thing was connected to at least one other Thing, if you looked deep down inside, it would keep being connected. If you looked out in any direction, it was always the same, Something was connected to Something else. That's binary code, Male and Female. Adam and Lilith, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark. Something like that. So naturally you think of the Tree.

We'll get back to Infinity later. There's all these birds flying around, taking up seeds. Some are dancing on the ice, eyeballing some chick. It looks festive, but it looks serious, like rice farmers before a storm. But it's still Binary, the seed and the bird, both symbols that go back as far back as we have symbols. We must have watched them a very long time, and talked about them a lot as well. I've always said, watch what you do, but do it. That's a lot like those birds. Very little gets them to forget their task, right up to when a big Dodge pickup roars by and they split to the shrubbery. Man, do you think they have a collective memory of some carnivore the size of that bearing down on them, like a whale sucking up krill?

So if the Mother Bird Goddess is one of the earliest, she'd be the one most dispersed. I've always warned people about feeding the gods but now they've gone and gotten Yahweh into a blood diet so I thought, why not bring up his Grandmother and have Her set Him straight? Why not make a temple to the Goddess in Her bird form that would look to the passing Dodge like a huge bird feeder aviary, gazebo or something that covered most of an acre? I have that much land here. There's even a spring and a cavern, although nobody has gone in, it's kinda shallow and wet, but then I've dated gals who in the end were shallow and wet.

You start with a few columns and apiaries that had vines that wound around trees forming atriums lined with flowers. Here and there you'd have shrines to the various forms of the Goddess in this area, the local stories. Like a Woodcock shrine, or a Hawk shrine, all connected with small areas protected from the rain and snow. Nice, eh? That's what they were like. That's why you read about the sacred column or pillars that get knocked down and broken in the Old Testament. He's got a lot of explaining there. I'm thinking they don't call Him a Volcano God for nothing. But She would fold Her arms and go on receiving His attention or not. That would piss Him off and the next thing you know we're in Iraq with a moron in charge surrounded by psychotic evangelicals.

You wonder why I'd risk calling in a Goddess with a full tilt local Shrine? It's that or nothing, I read the papers as well as the scrolls and testaments. Everybody says it's ugly when Mom and Dad fight. But I have to say that there's always Grandmother, and She kicks butt. So maybe you go neolithic, counting that by now she's not only spread all over the world, since She started near Babylon, she's just around the corner! Yeah, and the great thing is that by being a custodian of the shrine, me, my wife and cats and maybe a crippled son, we would pay no taxes except maybe a few gallons of our great wines. Or pies, something they'd like. They being the new local reps of the regional militia. I figure by the time we pay off the wars in the Middle East the You Ess of Hay will be broke, dead broke and with a very bad credit to boot. Well, people still gotta eat, and we have a lot of people, so you want to learn how to garden, how to grow organic, because by not almost every item of food gets pulled off the shelves to feed the starving army, or because of E Coli contamination. Could be bad.

But it could also be good. Suppose Grandma comes in with Her Broom of Might and stops the fight, ends the killing and requires Mom and Dad to go somewhere for a few millenium and screw or something? No talking, more Creation.

That might be nice. It'd be Persephone and the ice and snow would melt, most of Florida would go under and the Polar bears would have to go to Canada, which would work well for all those Natives would got given most of that tundra and permafrost as a sop to their national pride. Anyway, the grapes would grow great, so wines would be good, and a few more houses would be fenced and covered with passive defenses, mostly to ward off gangs of orphans or insurance salesmen.

There's this branch from an elderberry that was crushed by the falling elm tree, and as it sticks it's body out into the light, it branches out in two, as if reaching up to a divine figure, and on each branch there sits a chickadee, all puffed up against the cold.