Spring has always been my favorite season. I love all seasons, but spring to me is nature’s triumph over all things dismal, damp and dreary. And not just because it’s been a difficult and long winter. Nature, like human life, is both painful and also amazingly beautiful. Weeks before spring actually emerges (or bursts), my dreams of it coming are the pulse of life that trumps all reality.

Perhaps it is our dreams or our imagination or our fantasies that give us that sliver of light to get through gray days. Or to outlast catastrophic weather. Or to keep from drowning in despair over human failings and loss. The real trick, I think, is really getting to what beauty is, what happiness is, even if it is fleeting. Or maybe because it is fleeting, and to seize it for all it’s worth.

That’s when poetry becomes essential.

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Did you know Vermont women scientists are studying when babies develop a sense of humor? Others are interested in how potassium ion channels are regulated in the hypothalamus. Uniting these diverse, talented, and enthusiastic young scientists is support from the Vermont Genetics Network (VGN). VGN’s mission is to spread a “culture of research” across the state of Vermont. They make accessible and affordable the buildings and science equipment needed to carry out that research.

Directed by Dr. Judith Van Houten, the George H. Perkins Professor of Biology at the University of Vermont, the VGN is funded by a five-year $16.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. That’s the largest single investigator grant ever received by UVM.

And although the grant was awarded to Van Houten as principle investigator, she has spread the money and expertise around the state to a remarkable degree. The project develops research facilities and supports graduate research assistants at UVM, but also collaborates with seven Baccalaureate Partner Institutions (BPIs): Castleton State College, Green Mountain College, Johnson State College, Lyndon State College, Middlebury College, Norwich University and Saint Michael's College.

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In 2005, Norwich filmmaker Nora Jacobson had an idea for a film about Vermont. Her father, a New York playwright, had moved to the state as a young man in 1936 and bought a farm. Nicholas Jacobson was one of many urban artists to populate Vermont over the last century. Jacobson was interested in examining Vermont’s “interesting mix” of “people who have moved here intentionally and integrated themselves,” like her father, “and people who have lived here all their lives with no choice in it,” recalls the 61-year-old.

But soon Jacobson began to think, “One person shouldn’t tell the story of a state.” The filmmaker sat down with a friend, Burlington Free Press film reviewer Susan Green, and the two drew up a list of “everything we could think of that contributed to the way we see the state today.” Jacobson suggested some of these topics to filmmakers she thought might be interested in them. Other directors, hearing of the project, proposed segments exploring their own interests. The list grew.

Over the next nine years, Jacobson cut and stitched together countless reams of footage from her own camera and those of 47—yes, 47—other Vermont filmmakers. The end result is Freedom and Unity: The Vermont Movie.

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This past January Gov. Peter Shumlin dedicated his State of the State address to what has been called Vermont’s “full-blown opiate crisis.” Opiates include heroin and prescription painkillers (whose euphoria lasts less long than their dangers); death rates from overdoses are high. Shumlin brought passion to this year’s annual speech to Vermonters, highlighting the human cost of drug addiction, a lack of treatment options, and Vermont’s growing drug-related prison population. At the same time, he all but ignored one of the largest drivers of women’s drug addiction until the very end of his address: poverty.

It’s a stereotype to assume there is more drug use among the poor. The majority of the poor, or non-poor, do not use drugs. Vermont earned a ranking as the nation’s “number one state for illicit drugs,” when 15 percent of those surveyed admitted to having “used” in the past month, compared to 4 percent in lowest-ranking Utah. The ranking came from a 2011 survey reported by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and included all substances from marijuana to cocaine.

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