SPRING

Parker Palmer, “Let Your Life Speak”

 

I will wax romantic about spring and it splendors in a moment, but first there is a hard truth to be told:  before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck.  I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice.  But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.

 

I love the fact that the word humus – the decayed vegetable matter that fees the roots of plants – comes from the same root that gives rise to the word humility.  It is a blessed etymology.  It helps me understand that the humiliating events of life, the events that leave “mud on my face” or that “make my name mud,” may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow.

 

Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me.  The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again.  The crocuses and snowdrops do not bloom for long.  But their mere appearance, however brief, is always a harbinger of hope, and from those small beginnings, hope grows at a geometric rate.  The days get longer, the winds get warmer, and the world grows green again.

 

In my own life, as my winters segue into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to com, hard to hope until the outcome is secure.  Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility:  for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.

 

Spring in its fullness is not easy to write about.  Late spring is so flamboyant that it caricatures itself, which is why it has long been the province of poets with more passion than skill.  But perhaps those poets have a point.  Perhaps we are meant to yield to this flamboyance, to understand that life is not always to be measured and meted as winter compels us to do but to be spent from time to time in a riot of color and growth.

 

Late spring is potlatch time in the natural world, a great giveaway of blooming beyond all necessity and reason – done, it would appear, for no reason other than the sheer joy of it.  The gift of life, which seemed to be withdrawn in winter, has been given once again, and nature, rather than hoarding it, gives it all away.  There is another paradox here, known in all the wisdom traditions:  if you receive a gift, you keep it alive not by clinging to it but by passing it along.

 

 

Of course, the realists will tell us that nature’s profligacy always has some practical function, and that may well be so.  But ever since I read Annie Dillard on the immoderation of trees, I have had to wonder.  She begins with a mental exercise to help us understand how superfluous in design an ordinary tree can be – if you doubt it, she suggests, try to make a faithful scale model of the next tree you see.  Then, taunting the realists, she writes:  “You are God.  You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen.  Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?”

 

From autumn’s profligate seedings to the great spring giveaway, nature teaches a steady lesson:  if we want to save our lives, we cannot cling to them but must spend them with abandon.  When we are obsessed with bottom lines and productivity, with efficiency of time an motion, with the rational relations of means and ends, with projecting reasonable goals and making a beeline toward the, it seems unlikely that our work will ever bear full fruit, unlikely that we will ever know the fullness of spring I our lives.

 

And when did we start to misuse that beeline metaphor?  Just watch the bees work in the spring.  They flit all over the place, flirting with both the flowers and their fates.  Obviously, the bees are practical and productive, but no science can persuade me that they are not pleasuring themselves as well.

 

Where is the mud and muck in my inner garden?  What roots are fingering their way around?  What green stems of possibility are emerging?  What buds are preparing to blossom?

 

 

 

COMMUNITY

 

Community.  Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats.  Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power.  Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done.  Arms to hold us when we falter.  A circle of healing.  A circle of friends.  Someplace where we can be free.

                                                                                                                        ---Starhawk

 

 

 

A PURIFICATION

---WENDELL BERRY

 

At the start of spring I open a trench

in the ground.  I put into it

the winter’s accumulation of paper,

pages I do not want to read

again, useless words, fragments,

errors.  And I put in it

the contents of the outhouse

light of the sun, growth of the ground,

finished with one of their journeys.

to the sky, to the wind, then,

and to the faithful trees, I confess

my sins:  that I have not been happy

enough, considering my good luck

have listened to too much noise,

have been inattentive to wonders,

have lusted after praise.

And then upon the gathered refuse

of mind and body, I close the trench,

folding shut again the dark,

the deathless earth.  Beneath that seal

the old escapes into the new.

                   ---WENDELL BERRY

 

 

 

PARADOX

 

It is a paradox that we encounter so much internal noise

when we first try to sit in silence.

 

It is a paradox that experiencing pain releases pain.

 

It is a paradox that keeping still can lead us

so fully into life and being.

 

Our minds do not like paradoxes.  We want things

to be clear, so we can maintain our illusions of safety.

Certainty breeds tremendous smugness.

 

We each possess a deeper level of, however,

which loves paradox.  It knows that summer is already

growing like a seed in the depth of winter.  It knows

that the moment we are born, we begin to die.  It knows

that all of life shimmers, in shades of becoming –

that shadow and light are always together,

the visible mingled with the invisible.

 

When we sit in stillness we are profoundly active.

Keeping silent, we can hear the roar of existence.

Through our willingness to be the one we are,

we become one with everything.

                                                                       

                                                                        ---Gunilla Norris

                                                                        from Sharing Silence                                      

 

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on the brow

Of the flower,

and retell it in words and in touch,

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.

                                                ---Galway Kinnell