Spring Coming

Fat, fluffy flakes of snow on a windless April day drop like stamps, plastering themselves onto the grass, where tender greens tentatively shoot skyward.

As I watch, rapt, visibility diminishes; the conifers in the commons past my neighbour’s house accumulate an envelope of snow. The downfall doubles: a deluge of thick, soft letters mailed to earth, parcels of precipitation, messages from the heavens.

This April afternoon, a spring day like any other, is suddenly transcendent; presents appear behind the wrapping of snow: omnipresence, prescience. The other day I awoke from a strange nap to find myself saying, I am ready. Some mystery shapes itself on the horizon. I look forward to—what?  Perhaps it is just spring.

Just—spring!

What can match its potency, the gorgeous tug of vitality rising? My body is Persephone’s breast, swelling as our planet’s top half turns to face our star. (As the world turns.) My skin thrums, vibration arouses every cell.

At this mixture of latitude and altitude we must endure a kind of death each winter. How quickly, after All Saints Day, the dark appears. Plants, ants, even scents go dormant, their on/off switch activated simply by the lowering temperature, the lessening light.

The darkness descends, inevitably—just that simple pivot— and once again the curtain drops. And we drop with it. And it’s dark at the bottom. How can it seem to grow deeper each year?

I swoon at the winter solstice. Every year I do offer myself willingly: it’s not that hard to succumb to darkness—and rest—after the season of leafing and flowering and reveling in the orgy of summer energy.

But I have not yet learned to surrender completely. I still

ache for life; obviously I am programmed to revive. After the equinox I wait, eager, jonesing for the invigorating and intensely reviving scent of balsam. And when it finally comes I bend to the buds and inhale these smelling salts, lingering on the very definition of life.

And hang on because after that, spring arrives like a tsunami, with the too sweet smell of silverberry anointing May’s rains until the front-range forests become fecund with this unstoppable gush of life.

On this middle day of April, on a full moon afternoon, the snow falls thick and full of promise: this wet will soak the earth, and wet the roots and spark the return to life.

Every year it happens and every year it is more and more real. Perhaps this is the secret of eternal life: there is nothing but this moment, this return, this fullness, this promise, this ache, this lovely, lasting sensation that turns all of me into one aggregate of clanging, climaxing clitoris, every molecule attuned to the single note of pleasure.

And it cannot be stopped. This truth erupts, is told and re-told every spring. My buds, the sprouting, the shoots and willows, my essence, the catkins, the ants—nature wakes up.

This is creation, the mutation of hydrogen into every possible expression of life—the ones we are losing, the ones we destroy, the ones we grieve, and who grieve with us—and the forms that are evolving, keeping up with us, or in spite of us.

No matter the loss, despite the grief, whatever we destroy, this essence of life cannot be lost.

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

Rumi