In the Land of Waiting-for-Spring

A tulip-in-waiting.

Pasque flowers await Queen bees, yet to emerge.

In this season of waiting, in a time that can feel like the unraveling of the world, what gives life joy and meaning? What are the signs of hope that lift us up?

Wild ones always spark that joy.

Last week, at the base of this oak hill by the river, a flash of soft yellow caught my eye. An inquisitive little goldfinch watched me from her perch with bright eyes. As I spoke to her in my most bird-beguiling tones, she fluttered to a near branch, and then to a nearer to listen for a moment.

Another day, high overhead I saw a migrating kettle of hawks and watched, mesmerized, as they swirled and spiraled on a thermal, a column of warm, ascending air. An ancient, circling dance of black wings against blue sky.

Earlier, on an evening when telescopes were set up to view the stars, I witnessed a breathtaking sight: a flock of night-migrating swans. 

Out of nowhere they swept into view. They wheeled and undulated like a murmuration of starlings, then winged away west, a dazzling oneness of movement and purpose — crossing the continent to a destination only they knew. 

Never before have I witnessed the great movement of spring migration across North America at this scale, as it was happening. I was speechless with wonder, reverence. The swans' surety, their way of knowing what to do, where to go, when to go there...all of the many mysteries swans know of that humans do not; not least of all, how to get from here to there, using senses humans will never know. 

How amazing to see these white-feathered beings flying as one in all their power and striving, and in accord with their internal knowledge — inhabiting their full, embodied, necessary lives — in their rightful place in the great web of being. 

This is magic. This is the spell of the wild. Touched by the ineffable; the swans' sacred nature revealed to me, their utter belonging to the ancient cycles of the wheel of the year, and to the community of earth and sky. 

I felt I had touched the vital source. For one singing moment, I felt part of the vast sweep of life on earth, this beautiful earth I love so much. 

Beltaine blessings as the rain falls from this Land of Waiting-for-Spring. 

The garden of Eden

If I could plant the words I've written in the ground, what would grow from them, I wonder? 

A spiny cactus...?

A sweet fruit...?

A flowering tree...?

A perfect white blossom that unfolds under moonlight, and fades by dawn.

In my garden of self-negating choices grow spines, thistles and stinging nettles. 

This is a garden I have planted and watered. Bramble and thorn. Bitter fruits that poison the spirit. Withered tangles and spines that draw blood, numb the mind, drain away hope.

What are self-negating choices? 

Sometimes you neglect to be the guardian of your own needs and feelings. 

Sometimes you avoid knowing your own unhappiness. 

Sometimes you forget how to care for yourself. 

Sometimes you are the source of your own pain.  

In my garden of kindness is food for everyone. A sacred spring where every creature, every soul can drink the waters of compassion and healing. 

A cool green place to rest when weary. Deep and fertile soil, where the seeds of intention, wish, longing and mystery can take root. 

A place where I can grow into a person I can only imagine right now. 

Is this my true home? 

I plant it with my two hands, and call it my very own. 

'81 by Joanna Newsom

Rose and thorn

 

When the darkness comes and the fire is lit, when you sit together fearing what is to come, that is when someone calls for a song.

One unaccompanied voice rises in the silence. Grief-layered edges speak of sorrow, an ache that stirs longing and holds the loss of all who listen. A melody that sounds like the feeling of heavy clouds, pierced for a moment by a flood of sunlight. The refrain sends a vibration through you; a feeling like what once was, but now is lost.

Yet, at the very center of the calling to grief and sorrow, lay hope and joy. Because the truth is, there is no grief without joy, and no joy without grief. 

One lives within the other, forever intertwined; a briar rose, a blackthorn tree in bloom, a phoenix singing as it bursts into flame.

“Sorrow is not the opposite of joy. Sorrow is walking deeper into joy.”*  

Music, this wordless speech that arrows straight into our hearts. Music, the language of emotion, as art is the language of symbol and image.

Music speaks truths that bypass thought, truths about what it means to be alive. Music (as all we create) originates in an “other” place we cannot delineate or control. Music delivers transcendence, heightening and enlarging our experience as inhabitants of this bitter and sweet world. Music connects us to one another, tells us we belong here.

Music expresses the soul's longing in ways that words cannot.

John O'Donohue said, "Music is what language would love to be if it could." For the most meaningful experiences and emotions in life can be only suggested by words, which are just signifiers or representatives of emotions. Certain states of being may be beyond even the power of poets to tell.

Do you feel that is true?

But music, alive with its own ways of being, speaks to our emotional and physical body with language it understands; penetrates our inner landscapes to inhabit the psyche. The soul. 

There, in that unknowable land, music companions us — as a truth we understand without understanding how, as a story we tell to ourselves.

We help to create and enliven every song and story and poem that we love, simply by loving them. There is no love without co-creation. In loving, we fit together our edges, make their wonder part of ourselves — and gift our own wonder to them. 

What we love, we make our own. We make what we love our own. This, we know. 

We invite inside the song of rose and thorn, hold it fast, feel where it makes us wider and deeper, and make it our own.

And we are changed.

*Susan Cain, Unlocking Us Podcast.