APRIL SHOWERS

Trust the plan. APRIL SHOWERS. (Q#1008)

Spring sunshine poured liberally across the landscape, as Boone Braverman gazed gradually around the fields and forest encircling the main garden patch, where he and Tatyana had been planting herbs, lettuces, and various greens (kale, collards, chard), along with seedlings of broccoli and cabbage. Boone’s chief role in the planting was to draw a furrowing hoe along a staked-out string, with the requisite back-and-forth movement to clear a straight furrow of the desired length and depth. He liked to refer to the tool as a little one-mule plow, with himself

as the mule, and in that capacity he had plowed about 400 feet of furrow, which was one of the reasons he was now standing still, gazing around the farmstead: bodily fatigue. Another reason was that he was just now remembering the conjunction of Venus and Uranus that day, of which his astrological calendar had informed him, and that recollection, as his gaze continued its gradual perusal of the sun-drenched verdure of late April, led him to reflect on the meaning of that conjunction. Venus, the planet of love, and Uranus, harbinger of surprise, breakthrough, the unusual. “Sounds promising,” he thought to himself. “Let’s see what turns up. Puts me in a downright contemplative mood.”

The Reader of these stories is well aware that our Hero is no stranger to such moods. At the moment we have joined him, he is contemplating the land; the living, beloved land that has been his home and his homestead for over thirty years: the fields he had cleared, the house, barn and paddocks he had built with lumber mostly sawed from his own timber. His back and sinews contributed to these considerations, obtruding their own memories of those thirty years and more, and prompting thoughts of the approach of old age. Boone and Tanya were only in their late fifties, and had kept themselves fit for the life they had chosen to lead. But there was something about sixty that distinctly smacked of a threshold, an antechamber, to the fabled threescore and ten. A movement caught Boone’s eye. On the far side of the broad grass field west of the garden, Boris the Bolshoi and Fox the “Quaker Spaniel” were playing Batman and Robin versus a big groundhog morosely cast as the Joker. The two dogs were a lethal team, and the action did not arrest his gaze for long. The next sight that came into his vision, with loving contemplation in close pursuit, was the fair person of his beautiful wife.

Here, the planetary conjunction came into its own, so to speak, for however prodigiously Boone loved the land on which he stood, it was the woman who had shared most of his life there, lived with him and loved him as a wife, who now received the subtle emanations of that celestial circumstance. He gazed at her in genuine appreciation of her feminine charms, of which he had always been exceptionally fond, but now with a tinge of curious wonderment as to what the planet of surprise would bring, as it were, to the party. Just then, finishing up the row she had seeded and filled in, Tanya turned to look at him, catching the aforesaid gaze. “A quarter for your thoughts,” she said with a grin. Boone smiled back. “Oh, no, my Beauty. These thoughts will cost you more than that. Besides, you’ll have to wait until later.” Tanya pretended to pout, then broke into a giggle. “Well, if you insist, I’ll just be patient,” she replied.

The radiant sunshine, which had been playing chiaroscuro with scudding clouds most of the morning, again fell into shadow, and a few large drops of rain began to fall. “Looks like a real shower is coming,” Boone remarked, pointing to the west. “Let’s knock off. We’ve finished all but the cabbages, and they can wait. This is perfect for the seeds!” Grabbing their tools and calling the dogs, they headed for the house at a fast walk. It had been nearly time to quit anyway, as Boone had a late-morning appointment with a patient and Tanya had a few things she wanted to finish before lunch. Without pausing to narrate the details of those matters, some of which will be reflected in the conversation over lunch, we proceed directly to the old oaken table, where Boone, Tanya and Seth are assembled for that mid-day repast, and blessing has been asked upon the food.

Seth had just finished his weeklong training, over the Mountain in State College, for the forester internship he had secured: ten weeks over the summer working with a consultant forester on private lands. Being fresh off the training, he was highly enthused, and the conversation began on that subject, of which he began speaking before either of his parents could ask. “What’s cool about this internship is the conservation approach, which aims at creating healthy forests with abundant wildlife. It’s not about developing commercial timberland, but advising private landowners on optimizing forest health and wildlife habitat.” Boone nodded in approval. “Who’s funding the internship program?” Seth chuckled. “Glad you asked. Two NGOs. Ready? The Ruffed Grouse Society and the American Woodcock Society, that’s RGS and AWS respectively.” Tanya giggled delightedly. “Fantastic! I love it! No Soros money there, I bet!” Boone chimed in. “The Ruffed Grouse is our State bird. And who could knock the American Woodcock?” he grinned. “But seriously though, I’d love to have more grouse and woodcock around. Not so much for hunting, though a fat grouse is worth cooking if you can hit him. Might as well shoot a big robin, or a blue jay, as a woodcock. No, just to see ‘em around, and hear ‘em.” Seth piped in. “Since you mention it, Dad, how about I take a professional look at our woods, once I get up to speed a little. I’ll be pretty busy this summer doing fieldwork around the region, mostly forest inventory and management plan development. But maybe next fall and winter I could do our place for a senior project.” Boone stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Sounds like a great idea,” he responded. “Let’s see what you come up with.” Tanya had questions. “What’s the job like? How much will you travel? What are they paying?” Seth finished chewing, swallowed, and took a swig of milk. “Well, the fieldwork is mostly walking all over a given parcel of woodland, identifying and counting trees, the first step in forest management. My group is centered in State College, but I’ll be driving to nearby areas of the State, depending on the project. And I’ll be grossing just under $700 for a forty-hour week.”

The conversation moved along, as Tanya asked Boone about his naturopathic appointment, and he described, somewhat laconically, his advice and prescriptions to a man in his fifties who had difficulty sleeping well. “I could see the fellow was pretty high-strung, from his manner. So first, I told him to turn off all wi-fi in his house at bedtime, and avoid screens for an hour before he lies down. That, I said, may be the hardest part, but I strongly urged him to try it. The rest of the prescription, I told him, is easy. Chamomile tea, melatonin (up to ten milligrams as needed), and a double shot of strong skullcap infusion before retiring. Breathe deeply. Say your prayers. Ask for sleep. That’s what I told him. I see him again in two weeks, and I’m betting he won’t be so tense.” Having heard out the menfolk, Tanya had a few things to share, and chatted away cheerfully on several topics: the welcome decline in her tax accounting workload since the middle of the month, the larger refunds many of her clients had enjoyed, her preparations for a ceramic showing at a gallery in town, where she was focusing on tea sets—a real challenge—and a set of painted ceramic eggs she had made during Lent. There was also a bit about each of the absent offspring: Ivan was visiting that weekend at a classical Christian school that was looking for a teacher of Russian. Of Alice, Tanya mostly replayed the news of her recent engagement to Arthur Livingstone, the farm-raised constitutional lawyer who had been courting her, the gist of her discourse being her personal delight in the affair.

After lunch, Seth had a couple of his student forester friends coming over for a tree-planting party in honor of Arbor Day, several areas in the woods where the canopy had opened up, being targeted for the new trees. There was some brush clearing and some digging to be done, and there would be beer, showers or no showers—a real Arbor Day party. Tanya holed up in her studio for the afternoon, and Boone likewise in his office. The contemplative mood, to which we alluded earlier, did not exactly disappear in the interim between his departure from the garden with Tanya, and his arrival in the office after lunch. In a sense it was there all along, in the compassionate interaction with his patient and in his sympathetic openness to the voices of his wife and son, but covertly, as it were, like a sound in the background, of which we become unaware. Now, as he settled into the familiar chair, his battle-station, as he sometimes thought of it, the seat of his most studious deliberations, meditations and yes, contemplations, the clandestine mood emerged again into dominance.

Boone’s gaze fell on a dark, polished knot of wood, almost the size of his fist, which lay atop an inverted porcelain bowl on his desk, below the Christ icon. It was the burl of a wild rose bush, which he had laboriously unearthed back in February, and which, as he strenuously sought it out beneath the tangled bush of briers he penetrated, had become for him symbolic of Truth, considered as the goal of a Quest to penetrate the brambles of disinformation, deception and propaganda deployed in the cognitive battlespace of fifth-generation warfare. After washing and drying the burl, he had rubbed it with oil to bring out the beauty of the wood, and Tanya had made the base, which was green with white wild roses. Pondering the symbolic burl, Boone reflected that the human Quest for Truth ran deeper than the effort to discern the actual state of public affairs at a certain moment of historical time, in an environment of psychological warfare, as he and others had been attempting for more years than he cared to count. Not that he regretted the effort, or intended to relax on that front. He was constitutionally incapable of ceasing to seek the real story of the epochal events unfolding in his time. Besides which, he was persuaded that the restoration of the Republic depended upon the devotion of a sufficient cadre of citizens to that very effort. But the human Quest for Truth transcended matters of historical fact, moving on to questions of life and death, being and nothingness, good and evil, the Origin and End of existence.

Boone raised his eyes from the rose burl to the face of Christ in the icon. Those were the questions Christ came to Earth to answer, or rather, as their answer. “You are the Truth,” Boone murmured, “yet we must constantly seek You, even as believers. That’s what it means to be in relation with You, is it not, Lord?” He reflected silently for a moment. Faith was a marvelous gift. It established ones relation with God, yet included a tension toward deeper understanding of ultimate Truth. This was the kind of spiritual anchorage the human soul required, in order to resist the mass manipulation of passions by psychological operations. Boone dropped his eyes again to the rose burl. He still had plenty of time before the Pennsylvanian went live, and he needed to sift through the material one last time, peering between the lines to discern the heartwood of reality. That process, the results of which the Reader will presently learn, would be redundant to narrate, so we skip to the moment when Boone, following his usual sign of devotion, opened the podcast.

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, friends and patriots, to this Friday situation report on the American Restoration. It’s a showery Arbor Day in my neck of the woods, and many strange and marvelous things are afoot in the great wild world. From the fast-greening hills of the Keystone Commonwealth, I am Pennsylvanian. Now, before catapulting us into the maelstrom of current events, or rather the narratives portraying those events to our consciousness, I want to take a longer view of the drift of things, and of the development of the perspectives we Q-commentators bring to our analyses. This Operation, dating from the first Q posts, is now in its ninth year, so those of us who have been tracking it from the start, and trying to figure out the connections between the drops and the news, have been through a long, slow learning curve. Early on, most of us were focused on deciphering concrete predictions of timelines and even dates, along which or by which certain events would transpire, and repeatedly we were mistaken. Then we turned to analysis of particular events, as reported, trying to assign meanings to them in terms of information dropped by Q, and again, in the course of events, most of our predictions turned out to be erroneous. The thing that kept us going was the continual stream of proofs that the information posted by Q was provided by Military Intelligence, working directly with President Trump—proofs that continue to this day, as the President and his team use time-stamp and video-length numerical signals pointing directly to specific posts of current relevance. So nowadays, many of us old-timers are less focused on the latest events. Even if the narratives of those events turn out to be accurate, which takes two or three days to discern, the actual significance of an event in the scheme of things, and in the move-and-countermove structure of the Operation, may not be clarified for weeks. We have taken, instead, to looking for the overall trajectory of what seem to be the most significant events, in light of the ongoing comms I have just mentioned.

“So, with all of that said, and by way of catapulting ourselves into the maelstrom of the news-stream, what overall trajectory can we discern in the broadening disclosure of the problem of Israeli control within our government, while Israel is increasingly isolated as the warmonger of the Middle East? Think about it. There’s the revolt, whether real or staged, by several of the President’s former supporters, including Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Joe Kent, all of whom attributed his attack on Iran to Israeli influence. These accusations were foreshadowed by Marjorie Taylor Green, formerly a MAGA superstar, when she accused the President of covering up the role of the Israeli Mossad in the Charlie Kirk assassination, and of delaying investigation into the Epstein network, which is also linked to Mossad. But maybe best of all, the Iranian military has unleashed a series of AI-generated videos portraying Trump and Netanyahu, in very graphic imagery, as bloodthirsty killers of children and associates of Epstein. Which of course has the rhetorical value of focusing the President’s opponents on Epstein, with whom Trump has been repeatedly exonerated of having any nefarious connections. So that’s one arc of the trajectory we’re looking for.

“Now take a gander at the Middle East. What is going on with Iran? Well, the Islamic Republic was installed there in the seventies, while I was yet a boy, to be the constant provocateur to the Zionist State, keeping the region in perpetual warfare, the flow of weapons going, and the London bankers fat and happy. That setup is what is being destroyed. Like Israel, Iran has been a hub of Cabal operations, trafficking, money-laundering, etc. That is being disrupted. Meanwhile, China is forced to buy oil from us, including Venezuelan oil, and Russia, who filled and launched a fleet of tankers right after the Trump-Putin summit in Anchorage, is now permitted to sell that oil, including to Cuba. But getting back to the trajectory we are tracing, the Israeli government is in the hands of a coalition of ‘Greater Israel’ extremists, with whom Bibi is in alliance to stay in power and save his skin, while Trump has been increasingly sharp in his prohibition of Israeli military action at critical points in the Iran operation. This arc of the trajectory points to the geopolitical isolation of the Israelis, who will face Trump’s Board of Peace, including Turkey and Russia, if they continue their habitual aggression. Remember, Q said Israel would be last.

“Now, before we move on from Iran, there are a few more things to be said. For one thing, the axe has been laid to the root of NATO, as the President calls out the refusal of the ‘allies’ to assist in securing the Strait of Hormuz, adding that we won’t be there for them either, continuing the decoupling from the European socialist states which is already well underway. Another big deal is the ‘uranium dust’ from the buried reactors, which the President has insisted we will retrieve, because we can forensically trace the origin of the isotopes, and determine who supplied the uranium to Iran. A similar scenario is played out in Tom Clancy’s novel, Sum of All Fears, of which there is also a cinematic version displaying the usual monkeying with the author’s plot. Anyway, in both versions Islamic terrorists supported by globalist operatives detonate a smallish nuke at an American football game, in a false-flag attempt to ignite a war between the USA and Russia. In the nick of time, forensic analysis showed the nuclear isotopes had come from an American lab, and had been supplied to the Israelis who subsequently lost one of their tactical nukes. It is possible the Iranian material originated in the Uranium One deal engineered by the Clintons under Obama. We’ll have to see. But it’s worth remembering that the title Sum of All Fears is mentioned by Q more than once, and that the aria Nessun Dorma, which plays in the movie as the conspirators are hunted down and killed, has also been played repeatedly at rallies by the President.

“Okay, final comment on Iran, or rather on the news reports purporting to cover that operation. The zigzag, teetertotter incoherence of the information is their outstanding characteristic. One side assures us that talks are underway, and the other side insists they are not. The President declares victory, and the Iranians claim to remain undefeated. The Strait is open, and the Strait is closed. America blockades all shipping in and out of Iran, but the Strait is open to all other shipping, but Iran blockades several ships and the President says its okay because they aren’t American or Israeli. So, he’s basically saying, yet again, that the NATO/EU countries are on their own. Another aspect of the apparent incoherence of the narratives, and the sudden changes of tone, is the President’s personal style: the bombastic, almost raving rhetorical excesses, like sending a whole civilization back to the Stone Age, it’s all in the Art of the Deal. Make extreme demands with fierce demeanor, compromise as necessary, and hide what you’re willing to settle for. It’s simply how our Donald operates. Take him with as many grains of salt as you need, but he has been a great President, so trust his judgment.

“On the domestic front, there is another trajectory we can trace in the ongoing exposure of the seditious conspiracy launched by Obama and Hillary ten years ago, to impede Trump’s election and then to undermine his first term. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has publicly charged that this treasonous operation was approved by Obama, emphasizing that all the evidence is duly in hand, while John Brennan and James Comey, the directors of the CIA and FBI at the time, are under indictment in separate Federal courts. Kash Patel just stated most emphatically that arrests are coming, and soon. At the same time, polls are showing 62% of Americans now believe there was significant fraud in the 2020 election, and 65% believe that the events of January 6, 2021, far from being a right-wing insurrection as portrayed, were instigated and largely perpetrated by agents of the Federal government. There’s a definite sense that things are warming up. Maybe these are some of the April Showers Q mentioned, which after all, are said to bring May flowers. Which reminds me of another phrase from the drops, about the Pope having a terrible May, and how can we fail to recall the infamous tiff between the American Pontiff and the American President, when the former criticized American operations in Iran, only to be rebuked by the latter for his globalist politics. And in the context of the papacy, we mustn’t forget the role of the Vatican Bank, in cahoots with the City of London, as financial powers of the globalist Cabal, which is currently being dismantled, by controlled demolition as Riccardo Bosi puts it, through joint military operations worldwide by foreign partners of the US Military. So, given his globalist allegiance, and the vulnerability of the Vatican Bank, maybe this is the Pope to have a terrible May, and maybe this will be the May when he has it.. Not a prediction, friends, just a conjecture.

“As I wind this up, brothers and sisters, I want to sound a note of caution, a note I am hearing from some respected sources, about a traumatic scare event between now and the upcoming Semiquincentennial on the Fourth. On one hand, there’s a strong sentiment that some major MAGA victories have to occur before that date, or what’s to really celebrate? So, let’s say some major arrests happen: Q said that would trigger widespread, paid insurrections requiring military suppression. If there are indeed foreign sleeper cells who came in over the open border, they would likely be part of that picture. Given the Israeli situation, perhaps they will pull off another false flag, another 9-11 of sorts, but this time will be busted in the act, exposing their earlier infamies. Financially, there may be brief bank closures. Supply chains may be temporarily disrupted, especially in urban areas. To some extent the troubles will be localized, but the trauma will be national. The Emergency Broadcast System will be activated. The Storm long foretold will be fully upon us. Now, that’s a strong note I am hearing, and I would be remiss not to sound it for y’all. Evaluate your resilience. Lay in some cash and a few supplies, especially water. Do not panic. Let’s see what happens. Thanks for your generous donations. Talk with you Tuesday. Happy Arbor Day, and TGIF! From the showery slopes of Penn’s Woods, I am Pennsylvanian.”

Boone shut down his equipment, turned off the wi-fi, and sat back in his chair, rolling it a couple of feet from the desk and swiveling to his left, facing the north windows, where again splashes of golden sunlight swept over the rain-soaked grass and bordering forest. He smiled sardonically, reflecting on his efforts to shed light on what he had called the maelstrom of current events, including his conjecture regarding “April Showers,” a Q drop currently transiting its eighth delta. The whole shadowy architecture of the information war suddenly paled in reality, precisely in the light of the sun-drenched and rain-soaked landscape that arrested his consciousness with ontological credentials of impeccable authenticity. We shall leave Boone to enjoy his moment of contemplation, and for reasons of literary scale, hop and skip over the daily libations and dinner, and jump to the time set aside by Tanya and Boone to read some literary work to each other before bedtime.

The Reader may recall from a previous story, in the context of a discussion about a New Middle Ages, the mention of a Russian writer, Evgeny Vodolazkin, who had written on that topic as well as producing a series of major novels. Boone had questioned Tanya further about his books, and they had decided to read his earliest novel Laurus (Russian Lavr), which is written in the style of a late-medieval chronicle, and follows the semilegendary life of a remarkable Russian character. We join our protagonists in their sitting room where, side by side on the loveseat, they have been reading for a while. Boone is holding the book with his finger marking a page near the end, as they have paused to reflect on their reading before, perhaps, plunging on. “I think what impresses me most overall,” Tanya was saying, “is the sense that the whole society was saturated from top to bottom with Orthodox Christianity, from the most brutish and impoverished peasants to rich merchants and powerful princes—even the thieves had a real fear of God. What I mean is, the frank awareness of human sin, of how we fall short and need the Savior.” Boone nodded in agreement. “That really is the key, isn’t it? It’s not just the icons everywhere, and the churches everywhere, it’s the pervasive sense of a divine Law of which everyone runs afoul, of a divine standard set by the Creator for His creatures, to which no one fully measures up. And you know what? That same sense was instrumental in the American Founding, even in the Protestant forms of Christianity that were dominant at the time, and that was the leaven that saved us from falling into the way of the French Revolution, with its Enlightenment optimism about human nature.”

Tanya frowned. “That was great for America, but it didn’t keep Russia from being taken over by the Communist heirs of Robespierre, let’s see, about four centuries after the period Laurus is set in. But of course, as Turgenev and Dostoyevsky portrayed so well, the Russian intelligentsia had fallen to the radical Enlightenment, including its nihilist edge, and by the time the Tsar was overthrown, practically the entire officer corps was sympathetic to the revolutionaries.” Boone leaned over and kissed Tanya on the cheek. “That was a brilliant analysis, my Beauty. And by the way, you’re even prettier when you frown. Brings out that beguiling Slavic angularity, I suppose.” Turning her face to him, Tanya grinned and wrinkled her nose. “What does this do for my angularity, bearded one? But listen. What else impresses you in Vodolazkin’s evocation of medieval Russia, especially in connection with a New Middle Ages in our time?” Boone drew a deep breath and thought for a moment. “One thing that struck me was the severity of the ascetic practices carried out by Laurus, which seemed almost typical in the monastic-eremitic mentality pervading the whole culture. The holy fools are all skin and bones, wear ragged clothing in cold, snowy weather, and display miraculous powers, including walking on water. Of course, Orthodox tradition itself inclines more to the ascetic than does our American Evangelical ethos, and yet our Protestant forefathers held days of humble prayer and fasting at times of national crisis, a call we have so far not heard from President Trump, at least not the humility and the fasting. We’ll see how the day of Prayer goes on May 17.

“Anyway, another thing that stood out for me, not surprisingly, was the way of medicine and healing practiced by Laurus, in which administration of medicinal preparations, made from a vast pharmacopoeia of herbs, bark, roots and flowers, was supplemented by verbal incantations and prayer. You probably remember my commenting on some of those passages as we read them.” Tanya nodded. “I do. But I wonder if any of this relates to our New Middle Ages. What do you think?” Boone looked at her fondly. “I was just coming to that, my Beauty. If this country has another spiritual revival in her soul, another Great Awakening so to speak, such that a critical mass of citizens actually open their souls toward transcendent Truth, or the Quest for it, then perhaps the pervasive awareness of God’s reality will again infuse American culture as at the time of our Founding, in analogy with medieval Russia. As for medical incantations, I guess time will tell, but prayer and herbs have always been a large part of my practice.

“But one more thing about the book, the quality of consciousness it evokes, has to do with the interrelations, almost the intermingling of periods of time with each other, and with Eternity. Listen to theses line from the beginning of the next chapter.” Opening the book, he read: “Beginning that winter, Laurus lost track of forward-moving time. Laurus now sensed only cyclical time, which was a closed loop: the time of a day, of a week, or of a year.” He closed the book and looked at his lovely wife. “Two things about that passage. One, it suggests a characteristic of spiritual consciousness that may accompany an Awakening of the American mind in a New Middle Ages. And two, the phrase ‘the time of day’ reminds me what time of the day it is.”

Tanya giggled. “That’s the same look you gave me in the garden this morning, when you postponed my offer to purchase your thoughts.” Boone turned his face toward her. “Well, this is your lucky time of the day, my Beauty, because I’m just now running a special on those thoughts: no charge whatsoever, and satisfaction guaranteed.”