Spring reveal

Sign of Spring: Finding what was lost. 

The snow that fell ten days ago was wet and heavy, and I worked up a sweat as I shoveled it. Each shovelful had to be lifted to the very top of our four-foot snowbanks — high enough that the shoveled snow would not slide back down onto the sidewalk. 

The temperature hovered around freezing and I was becoming uncomfortably warm. I took off my hat to cool down. Five minutes later, off came my knit mittens. I unzipped my coat and kept shoveling. 

Still too hot, so I peeled off the jacket, and threw that on our front steps with everything else.

After shoveling, I gathered up my sweaty outwear and took it inside. 

Only, I was a kitten missing a mitten, as I found out the next morning.

I went outside and scanned the sidewalk and snowbanks. Hmm, a fine job of shoveling, but not a mitten did I glimpse. 

I looked the next day, and the next day, too. How frustrating. I liked those mittens. They are blue-gray and match my jacket. 

I admit, I like certain things to match.

"Where is it? Who would take one mitten?" I complained to my husband. "One mitten is no use." 

Was it someone who had also lost a right-hand mitten, and had been just waiting to find one to replace it? 

Maybe some Golden Retriever had picked it up, and merrily carried it away as a prize? (You know how they are.) 

Why hadn't I checked that I had everything before I went inside? How could I lose a mitten in my own front yard? I was filled with self-recriminations. Yes, over a mitten. 

After a week of this, I gave up on my dreams of recovering my lost mitten, and ordered a new pair.

I should have known. Today, Spring pulled back the edges of Winter's icy pantaloons to reveal a very sodden and icy mitten, on the front steps. Where it had sunk into the snowy edges. 

Surprise! Winter trickster strikes again.

It is only March 21. Winter is not yet done with his surprises. 

People often talk about "balance" on the equinox because for one day, we have equal times of light and dark. Then somehow that all gets mixed up with spring, which is not a balance at all but a transitioning between the season of not-growing and the season of growing. When it comes to seasonal transitions, or life transitions, there is no balance; more of a balancing.

By no means does spring (or any other season) "begin" at any specific time, much less one day. This is important to note; because if your region is not springlike on the first day of spring, you know it is best not to be literal about these things.

And also there are clearly more than four seasons. Let's look at the meme lore regarding springtime. The seasons following upon winter that we call "spring" actually progress something like this: "Late first winter." "Fool's spring." "Second winter." "Spring of deception." "Third winter." "Mud season." "Actual spring." 

Fool's spring, the time I suspect we are in right now, is also known as early spring. Plenty of snow on the ground, melting around the edges. See-sawing between fresh, blue days and cold, gray ones.  

The robins, cardinals and red-winged blackbirds, however, are convinced that it is a good-enough spring for them. 

The birds do not wait for a better, springier spring to come along, they get on with it. As always, they know there is no time to waste. Sing now! Mate now! Live now! 

CHERT! CHERT! proclaims the red-winged blackbird beside the marsh. We are alive, and the time is now. 

Needless to say (but I will say it anyway), animals don't have time for bewailing what can't be helped. Instead, they get on with living, regardless of snow, gray skies or less than ideal circumstances. 

What if you thought of any circumstance as ideal? All the circumstances in which you are alive. 

Now, for instance.

That feels like a winged thought, a way of living fit for birds and humans. Even now, hundreds of miles away, the warblers and monarch butterflies are taking wing, migrating north over this vast continent. 

They're coming, it's happening, just hold on.  

 

True song

I woke to the true song of the robin.

All alone he sang, a brave voice in the darkness before dawn, claiming his rightful territory.

He sings of spring, a mate, rain, old berries yet uneaten, insects wakening under dead leaves. Of sunlight flooding through bare tree branches and twiggy nests earthworms wriggling forth from the earth to drink of its cold moisture.

A week ago in Santa Fe, the air smelled of dust, pinon smoke, apricot blossom, and juniper.

I still feel a slight sense of dislocation, a neither-here-nor-there. A ghosting feeling, as if my body arrived but some part of me (my spirit?) is following more slowly, maybe migrating northward and on the wing like the robins, not yet at my destination.

Air travel is especially abrupt when traveling between such dramatically different landscapes, with bare time to transition from Southwestern spring to Northern spring.

There: A high desert clarity. A sea of dry air that steals away all moisture from one's nose, in which skin takes on a map-like texture, an atlas of lizard trails and pebbled riverbeds and beetle-traced tree bark.

We walked through arid gardens of soft sands, yarrow, dusty gold, sage and subtle greens against the backdrop of pine-dark mountains, under vaulting arcs of cloud...

Down streets so quiet one could hear the gentle patter of blossoms hitting the ground...

House finches with rosy throats warbled their songs in the fruit trees, plucking blossoms one by one and drinking their nectar before discarding them to flutter to the stones below, and the adobe walls were painted by soft shadows.

We followed in the footsteps of ancient peoples, through the canyons, cholla, cottonwoods lining the small river (like but unlike their eagle-eyried kin along the Mississippi River), dusty paths, vast walls and fortresses of ember-lit and golden limestone towering overhead, glowing against the blue sky.

We climbed into cool-shadowed cliff dwellings, blew dust from our noses, carried water for the journey, rested in the shade, rested in the quiet, the quiet of an ancient place. All wild places are ancient, and sacred, but some strike one so more than others, like this one.

What would it be like, getting to know even one mountain? To watch such an eternal being through every shift of light, season, weather? Calming, I would imagine, an object of contemplation, meditation, inspiration, like Pedernal Mountain to Georgia O'Keeffe.

Oh how beautiful the paintings, but just as much the life of an artist following her vision, the photographs made of her working in her kitchen and garden, a life all of a piece, making sense.

Maybe that is what lingers most of all, a calling I have heard before and hear again. My true song. Will I listen this time?

So early in the spring

Early in the springtime, my lungs need oceans of air. [an everlasting wash of air.]

A huge expanse of sky, where eagles circle...where human eyes can rest on a vast vault of wind-washed blue softened by cloud.

(Do you see her up there, the glorious winged one? Did she hear me speak to her in praise as I moved below, so small and large-hearted through the wildlands?)

Trammeled by months of dimness, small screens, small rooms, small gaze—so close to warmth of hearth, breathing the small air of home—my mind rests on these broad sweeps of land.

The particular beauty of trees on a rise that I have loved for my whole life without ever tiring of their speaking branches, of their shapes curving against the sky, so individual in their ways, complete in themselves.

Before I am ready, I come up against a boundary. [Then the good minute goes.]

It sends my thoughts racing ahead, worrying against peace's edge. Once the boundary-less becomes bound, my large breath begins to shrink...until the wind rattles the grasses, the red-winged blackbirds chirr, and there I am again, back to where I stand.

If you live in a place where the ground does not freeze, then you miss the pleasure of the thaw—that receptive, bodily feel of the earth under your foot yielding once more to your weight, a sensation you may not have even realized you had lost until it is restored to you. It reminds you that the earth is your beloved.

How fair you are, young birch sisters, I think.

Red-osier dogwood, bright kinnikinnick, you that the native peoples honored, I send you good greetings.

O oak-crowned hill, do you feel the reverence with which I approach you? Maybe the rustle of your leaves as I pass is for me.  

On this day, you feel once again in conversation with this earth, like catching up with a relative you have not spoken with for many months, though you were sometimes lonely.

It is more than walking on. Together you walk, reunited.

[Two in the campagna.]

Fits and starts

Now let the snow retreat, withdrawing its hands from the north lands, peninsulas shrinking to fingers, fingers dissolving into crackle-ice that shatters under our feet. Let rough-crystalled islands shrink back into the thirsty earth and open paths and thoughts untrodden for many months.

Winter and spring will keep dancing a while longer. After a few days of major melting, wet snow fell one evening last week, softening and blurring the edges.

You see that I have exchanged the snowflake on my front door for the songbird of spring as a bit of sympathetic magic.

I am in a similar uneasy transition between one way of being and another. Back in that old push-pull state, trading the hours that I had in abundance for a salary and benefits.

Above all, I don't want sitting at a computer all day, in an office with no daylight, to make me lose or forget connection with what's real and what's central: The land, the river, the birds, trees and sky.

Here's what I know. Almost every day, I have an encounter with an other-than-human being that lights up my world. A sight that makes my eyes overflow with beauty and my heart swell with love.

This sacred planet we live upon and are part of is speaking to us, calling our attention to it and then sending love at us. I can only think that there is a conversation going on. Energy, attention, love, gratitude. We have to be paying attention to hear it. And if I stay away or starve myself of this conversation for too long, I feel all wrong.

In the park-that-was-oak-savanna today, a blue-sky day but cold, I went walking. I'd been feeling low on energy, a bit down.

I heard a sound up in the trees. A crooning, confiding, avian sound that swivels my head around, sends my eyes searching for the source.

Two full-grown bald eagles huddled side-by-side on a high branch with a wide view of the river gorge, backs to the wind. Looking for rabbits in the undergrowth, fish in the thawing water, maybe. Maybe resting, being companionable, maybe preening each other's feathers. I do not know the ways of eagles, yet that's no barrier to loving them.

If they hadn't made those sounds (low kuk-kuk-kuk call) and if I hadn't taken a detour from my own thoughts or my living room couch, I would not have noticed them at all, these magnificent feathered kin on their high branch.

I send them winged thanks and watch until they glide down a current of air over the river bluff, out of sight.

Blessed, smiling and definitely lighter of heart, I walk on in the cold sunshine of earliest spring.

Wild as the wind

We release the birds on the equinox.

It is a day of tossing winds, a fresh coolness blessed by a scintillating flood of warm, golden light.

Evidence of the acreage's history as a farm shows up in rusted implements grown over by grasses. Old pasture. Empty barn, tumbledown fences.

And then there are the outside enclosures, where the rehab birds gain the strength to fly away.

Black wings circle overhead. A crow who had been released a week earlier is coming back to the enclosure to look for food. On this equinox, he is still in limbo, in transition between two worlds...no longer living fully within the world of humans but not yet entirely committed to the world of crows.

We gather in a circle by the lake. Girl children in gaily colored jackets take turns positioning themselves around the small basket cages set on the ground. One cage at a time, the girls lift the unfastened tops.


The House Sparrows zip off into the trees quick as a thought, and sit preening their gray feathers.

The American Robins fly off in three different directions, trailing their characteristic, chuckling whistle.

The mourning doves whir slowly over the heads of the onlookers. They seem confused by this sudden change in circumstance. One lands on a lady's shoulder. Another touches down on the large camera lens of a man photographing the event. These are shooed gently on until they flap up into a nearby tree.

But one mourning dove--cage open to the sky, urged to fly--would not leave.

She was not ready.

I lift the gossamer milkweed seeds into the wind and set them free. They float over the grasses and tiny, bee-buzzed asters; catching on withered stalks or unfurling indefinitely for all I know, all the way into November, where they will freeze hard to the ground until winter's scouring hammer cracks them open. Thus tested, they will wait in the dark, in the ice, in the cold. Until they are ready.

The hours unspool in the wind and air as the planet spins beneath our feet. Twelve hours of light, twelve hours of darkness.

Seeds harvested. Seeds planted.

I think of this poem. And I wonder: Is it time?

How did it escape me that we were walking in Eden

plucking ripe apples on the equinox

one foot in darkness, the other in light

strolling down a country road in the Days of Awe?

How did I fail to faint with wonder

when our sister the snake waited for us

halfway across the road, stubborn in her staying power

seeking the safety of the grass only when we'd passed?

When will I learn that life is like a dream

full of strange and curious wisdom, wild as the wind

and just as liable to slip through our fingers

when attention wanders from the precious present?

When will I remember that no one sees it all?

We need one another to make the dream real,

to rise up in joy and in power, rubbing

against one another until we shed our skins.

—Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.