Spring

March 21, 2016

Greetings from the warming,

“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.” Rainer Maria Rilke

To be honest I had lost track of the dates and hadn’t noticed that Spring was due.  I tend to take my cues from nature not the calendar, and where I live that really is foolish. 

It’s like when you are playing cards around a table and the game is progressing and then there is a lapse when nothing happens, everyone looking at their cards and waiting for the next one to be played somehow.  And someone finally says ‘Oh, is it me?’  Such it is with the seasons in Michigan. 

I went for a run on the first day of spring, while only twenty four hours ago might have been December.  It was cold enough for snow, but lacking the exact recipe for that, the air formed winter in my lungs, a little something by which to remember the frost later on in the day.

Bundled up against the chill, hat and gloves, layers scientifically proven to ward off twenty degrees, I ran along a wooded path.  The trees on either side seemed unaware that the season had changed; no calendars to interfere with reality out there.

Between the bare branches I watched the river, muddy and stern, churning along its banks on the way to somewhere, filled with melted snow and the rain that chased it.  Even as the light formed in the woods it seemed dreary, certainly not inspired by the poet’s version of spring. 

I clopped along, ungainly and stiff, some of which was the temperature, some my advanced age.  As it always happens, eventually I warmed up, the muscles relaxed, the joints loosened, and I slowly made my way into the better version of me. 

I skated along a wooden bridge, slippery with frost, and paused to look along the river.  The sun was nearly up, still shy behind a grey curtain.  I felt the earth tilt, almost enough, toward the warmth. 

The philosopher Albert Camus described the human spirit, his own strength against struggle, in one of my favorite quotes.  “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”  The beauty in this is that the strength does not come from a change in seasons or circumstance; it comes from our choice to be the summer within.

Easy to say in an inspired moment on a wooden bridge, waiting for the sun to turn the world to summer.  And then you feel the cold creep into the places where the sweat has formed, and you remember that nature doesn’t care about calendars or Absurdists or runners.  It can challenge one’s resolve to be in the moment.

 

A few weeks ago, sitting in this same chair in the dark hour before dawn, I heard a barn owl outside my window.  I was entranced by his sound, deep and melodic, chanting at me from a tree just a few feet from my desk.  He was serious and thoughtful, sharing the perspective that owls are famous for.  The message he thought I needed to hear in that morning was; that which we love most often requires the most patience.  It was not up to anyone else to provide that.

Just now as I was writing this, he was there again with his staccato question, made rhetorical since we both know the answer.

Within patience is a resolve that allows us to outlast the fickleness of nature or other randomness of the universe.  That tenacity that doesn’t fail when tested by chill or pain or time or distance.  Where does this come from, this patience?  Who will provide this strength to push past the midst of winter?  Who can give us the will to smile in the moment when we are in the wrong season?

Who indeed?

Hope this finds you moving patiently,

David