March, the hybrid month. Enter as a lion, exit as a lamb. And in the middle, there is that portentous “beware the Ides of March.” I’ve found all of it to be true on the calendar of my life. 31 days of March have barely been enough to contain my high-light and low-light anniversaries therein.

Not to mention, more often than not, it includes some of Mom Nature’s most magical seasonal transitions. Here in Minnesota, you might get the fury of a blizzard scouring out the last remnants of the past year, subsiding with aromatic hints of something viridescent awakening deep within the earth. Mud and green. God the alchemist conducts the most profound transformations right on the roof of Hell in March, if only to tweak a fallen angel’s nose. Soon, the enchantment of life from death will rise toward the sun, burst into profusion, and launch an orgy of lust.

But first, there will be crust snow. That’s the stuff that thaws by day and freezes by night. And if I pick my hours right, crust snow will support me on skis as I soar helter-skelter off-trail, slaloming around trees and low-slung branches where the penalty for missing a gate is decapitation. Do it under a full moon, and you meet the sorceress of midnight and the wizard of dawn.

Skiing the March transition from one season to another is the consolation Olympics for me this year. But at least I don’t have to deal with the trials and tribulations of state-sponsored corruption, failed drug tests and hybrids of a different sort, i.e. sexually ambiguous athletes. Reminds me of my satire “The Mickey Mouse Olympics,” first published in Omni Magazine many decades ago. The story – which shifts between two sport coaches, Russian and Soviet – spoofs massive cheating through recombinant DNA and the protests that follow. My fictional games are held in Cuba and sponsored by Walt Disney, with the second and fourth rings of the five in the Olympic chain destined to become Mickey Mouse ears when the games are over and the venues convert to a Disney theme park. The story has been a cash cow for me, enjoying lucrative reprints, including Best of Omni and an Isaac Asimov anthology. In a literary world where payment averaged between ½ cent to a nickel a word, I was getting up to 50 cents/word. Maybe I’ll market it again next Olympics, since it looks like politics and cheating are ever more prevalent.  

By the by, to all my friends from the aquatic world who swam with Mary Lou Shefsky, if you enjoyed her superb adventures tracing her years as a Peace Corps volunteer in South America (LOVE AND LATRINES in the Land of Spiderweb Lace), she has another book out. DAMN HITLER presents a very different take on WWII through intimate letters from her father, stationed in the Pacific theater, which she has annotated extensively. Being a deeply personal work of love within her family, she is offering it free to her friends. Here’s a link:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/87iivzbkizdn53p/DamnHitler_E-COPY.pdf?dl=0

By the time the March Full Moon arrives, this Sullygram should be in your hands. The Celts called the March Full Moon the Chaste Moon because it heralds the first day of Spring and the purity of fresh life. Chaste. I guess all that he-ing and she-ing of Spring get a pass, if you think of it that way, and so that’s my take-away for March: something pure and new, which just happens to be what I celebrate on the capstone date of March 27^th for this month. In all the swelter of ironies, oddities and karma over 31 days, there had to be one redemptive date to glorify the rites of spring.

Wish I’d taken more photos over the last month, but when you stop to record some gorgeous fantasy come to life, you stop being part of it. Here’s a mixed bag including #1 a beautiful painting for my story in Omni Mag, which was a full-size glossy magazine with a bent toward science and discovery; #2-5 ski rambles off-trail through Crow-Hassan; #6-10 veils of mist, snow and night in the back-country of Elm Creek; #11 view from the lakeside home God is leasing to me; #12 my friend Lexy says I should do an overnight dog sledding adventure near Ely, MN, and this photo of hers is a compelling argument. Lexy was in high school, working at Elm Creek, when I first met her a dozen years ago. Turned out she and her sister lived half a block from me, and if you had told me that someone in the neighborhood would end up living nearly off the grid in the Boundary Waters, I would have thought it was me. Alas, I’m still here languishing in the creature comforts of civilization, but both Lexy and her sister Hailey have established households in Nature’s parlor. Midnights on a lake…dog sledding ‘neath a spangle of northern stars…a sense of motion in the magnitude of space open in all directions…and the pure white benediction of snow. That’s the White Cathedral I often write about. Thanks for reading. Wishing you nightly firmaments to dazzle your eyes and galvanize your soul!

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan