LindsayD7's blog

This is Spring

Children gambol on the gentle hillside between our houses where forsythia blooms.  The fronds adorning the old willow stump are filling out, a green fountain. These are bright compositions of happiness and hope, the faithfulness of Earth greening once again.  Yet for me they are splashed with other thoughts and emotions.  Perhaps it is the times in which we live or, just as likely, my particular heartbreak, but there are moments when I crave a more mottled canvas.  In The Seasons Book Parker Palmer writes

 …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.

Other Possibilities

The old willow stump by the creek has sprouted pale green fronds.  The crocuses are pushing up through brown leaves. Water in the creeks gurgles irrepressibly over rocks, bird song wafts delicate music in the trees, and frogs make frothy love in the ponds. Spring has arrived, despite the world’s troubles. This means that for the next few precious weeks, or maybe only days, it will be possible to walk comfortably in the wild woods.

Where the World is Breathing

 

Something inside of me has reached to the place where the world is breathing.

--Kabir

Days each week, I go walking in the woods with a story in my pocket.  It’s winter now, and the landscape is a mass of tawny leaves, twigs and branches.  I pass trunks sprouting delicate scallops of pale fungi and fallen logs green with moss.  My boots rustle through the brown leaves, crisp with cold, and thunk in the mud along the creek banks.  A flash of red and a harsh call announces the pileated hurtling through the gray trees.  The rest of the forest is quiet.

Way Upstream

A friend involved with regional efforts to protect the Chesapeake Bay once told me of a meeting she attended in which representatives of area organizations and advocacy groups stood one by one to enumerate their steps and actions in the cause.  After quite a while of this, it was the turn of a rabbi from a local environmentally concerned congregation.  She stood at the podium and began her remarks, “Well, we work way upstream…we work at the level of soul.”

The Cedars of Lebanon

In the human imagination, and as they have been throughout the ancient world, the cedars of Lebanon are sacred trees, planted by God.  They are long-growing, strong, the material of temples and voyages in sea-roaming ships.  

Recently I read a piece in The New York Times by Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard describing how the cedars of Lebanon could vanish by the end of the century.  The warming climate is stressing the trees, and political and cultural upheaval makes protecting them haphazard.  “Many thousands of square kilometers of forest once spread across most of Lebanon’s highlands.  Only 17 square kilometers of cedars remain, in scattered groves.”

At the Poor People’s Campaign in DC in June, the Rev. William Barber asked the assembled crowd,

Ghost Pipes

Monotropa uniflora is a small plant, wholly white, a pale translucent flute known as Ghost Pipe or Ghost Plant. It bends at the top and has but a single flower. Without chlorophyll, it cannot create energy as green plants do, from the sun.  Instead it draws energy from the fungi that cluster in the roots of trees as they reach into the dark earth.  Ghost Pipes appear rarely around here, in the threshold time between spring and summer, albino messengers from another realm.  Josh saw a covey of them in the Memorial Grove during his run on a cool misty morning. He was struck by their presence in that place of remembrance, reflecting, “It felt eerie and beautiful all at the same time.”

Breaking the Spell

"They say Aslan is on the move."  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis has enthralled me ever since I was 9 and read the Puffin book with its pen and ink illustrations by Pauline Baynes.  Many generations of children have loved the secret world filled with unconventional and magical creatures, and the young heroines and heroes who are neither patronized nor belittled.  I too loved Narnia, every thicket and lamppost, faun, centaur, and dryad. I loved how in the story subtle sounds and shifts in the air foretold the approach of the yet unseen Aslan and the breaking of the Witch's spell.  

Imperfection

Last week we changed the clocks, “spring forward”, shifting the hours to catch more afternoon sun.  As the daylight slowly widens toward the solstice, we strive to let the natural light linger, to grasp its presence.

Around here we have taken advantage of the longer afternoons to spend more time outdoors, in the still-chill air, looking toward the sort of green and golden light of summer in which Mary Oliver wrote her well-known poem “When I am Among the Trees”. In it, despite being drenched in light, Oliver sighs, “I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment…” 

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