Monday, March 5th, 2007
I can’t say I know what makes the bright green head of a sprout suddenly arrive in the open air from the dark moist earth, but I can say that I have felt that feeling in my own heart. I have felt my own heart trust something unimaginable and burst forward with new life. For me springtime, in any of its forms, is always that amazing reminder that life always and inevitably, follows death.
Those moments when a new light comes over everything and it seems as if everything has been washed and is new…those are the moments when anything seems possible again. If we were always in complete memory of our true nature, life would feel that way at all times. Anything, any spring, that can remind us of the ever-present new world of possibilities all around us is a blessing.
It doesn’t matter if it isn’t spring where or when you read this, only that the energy of spring is transmitted to your heart with these words. I look around my house and I see the stumps of the trees we lost in the winter storms, and the leveled blackberry bushes. Everywhere I see endings. I know we all have moments in our lives that feel that way. But if I tune in just a bit deeper I feel life moving…so profoundly and with such energy and vitality. Just under the earth there is a force more powerful than anything I can see with my physical eyes, and it is moving to bring new life to the surface of the world.
This new energy is not just there because it is spring. It is always there. It is an energy that is cascading off the moon and the sun and the trees and your human body. It is boundless and creates waves of abundant energy that is accessible to us. The new sprouts and blossoms of spring just remind us of this.
In the next week or two the island I live on will be covered in blossoming fruit trees, mostly pink and overwhelmingly enchanting. Then there will be a phase when those petals are always falling on the breezes and filling the streets, sidewalks, and grasses with tiny kisses from the heavens. After all the petals have fallen the larger flowers will bloom, everything will look green, and then, just when it begins to quiet, the wild rose buds will begin to come out and their fragrance will fill the air.
It will continue on this way until the sweet peas spill in purple over fields and at summer’s end the grass dries everywhere and you can smell the hot earth. Then, in the fall, the bright red madrona berries will be splashed along the skyline…and then everything will become quiet again. Twenty years in close contact with one place that I adore has given me this gift, but you can have the gift of noticing cycles anywhere, at any time. Keeping contact with the moon was the only thing that gave me the sense that I was still on the same planet when I moved to India at nineteen years old.
When we notice nature’s cycles we are reminded of our own cycles and of the amazing power that we are, and that fills us at all times. If you have been looking around your life and seeing nothing but endings, remember that there is only one meaning left within that…new life is bound to be bursting forward before you know it and when you aren’t even looking yet.
If you live in this hemisphere, and not in the tropics, and spring is indeed unfolding now in your world, give yourself an afternoon off and take a walk somewhere that things grow. Look for the signs of spring around you and take them all as signs of your new life coming into being, and as signs that the seeds you planted in the past with fervent hopes and prayers, are now coming to be.
Love, Jennifer
