Return of spring
A kiss of softness in the breeze
Buds that swell then burst
The foliage a frothing verdant splendour
A blanket that’s been flipped
Snowy white on one side
A patchwork quilt of riotous colour on the other
Months in dormancy
Yet always alive
Waiting for the predestined timing
Resurrection of hope lost in grey days
Reminder of eternal life
The greening.
If you’re from the part of the world, like I am, that sees months and months of winter, it’s easy to understand how people have chosen to believe you must struggle before you succeed. Before any victory, any phase of bright ideas that lead to a win, you must lay your mind down quietly and submit.
I can sense in myself my hardwiring around this, the need for seasonal change that sparks vibrancy in my life. Every spring in Ontario I am struck again by the sheer majesty of nature - the garden a mess of hyacinth, daffodils, violets, snowdrops, forsythia. The lilacs budding, the maples and oaks showing a new shadowy haze around the branches that were not so long ago bare against a stark grey sky.
Every time I am enthralled, I nearly can’t believe it happened. Yet it is guaranteed - for now anyway - that winter will give way to spring. That hibernation will end and sleepy heads will rise from their slumbers, that the world will burst forth in vibrancy.
It makes me think about my own life, about the times of challenge and woe and how good days are not just possible, they are certain. They are expected.
And right now I am like the late winter plants, the ones that still seem bare, hardened from the cold and looking undernourished. Needing sun, warmth, the thaw. My life path lays before me, the transitions that are most certainly coming with rapidity, well now, you don’t see them at all. But you sense them, you know they are certain.
Death and rebirth, the cycle is endless. And more often death is not as it seems, just a suspended phase before the next version of life takes over. The evolution. I see it now that way.
What next version will my life take on? Which way will it go? A series of choices and decisions and happenings stand before me and what’s next. And though, like the winter plant, I see little evidence of what I desire, I feel it deeply.
Deep in my roots an endless surge of life teems and feeds the desires of my heart. They are there, just waiting for the same divine timing, the same happenstance, the change in the temperature, a sweet caress of the breeze.
That is the part that is outside control, the part where we can seemingly linger in winter for ages longer than we thought possible. When spring will really arrive, the timing. A snowstorm at the end of April or maybe even into the beginning of May. A cold wind that just won’t subside even though the sun is peeking through the clouds. Trees stubbornly bare weeks after you’re sure they’ll bloom.
And then they do. They always, always do.
I’ve gathered parts of all the places I’ve lived and visited over the past five years and tucked them away. Stitched together to create a tapestry of longing but not the kind that feels desperate and unrequited, the kind that simply moves things along, brings the right cadence to the music. This frequency is calling ever closer the full picture of life I intend to live.
I see it in every moment of effort, a splitting between what is and what might be. The time for flamboyant faith, for hope held-fast, is now.
For prayers get answered. Dreams manifest. Seasons change. Life prevails.
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