Oh. This. Night. (spring comes softly)

“We are here to witness the creation and abet it.  We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed.  Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.  We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us.”  [Annie Dillard]

I have been up the mountain tonight.  I have finally been well enough to go walking, to be in the sun, to ride my bicycle, to throw a tennis ball for the dogs, to carefully cut back the dead and dried sticks and vine that litter the perennial beds in the gardens here.  With the strength of wellness rising up in me I have felt myself finally re-root in my home.  I realized something, sometime this winter, after a jaunt to another state.  Upon returning home, I felt out of sorts for days while I was pinned down in the house and studio, madly catching up with life and business and work.  I felt out of sorts until I took myself outside, hiked for miles through the snow under an Idaho blue sky, hugged a douglas fir and sipped hot tea from my thermos in the quiet of a high place.  After traveling, I find I am not quite myself until I reconnect with the land here.  It’s the funniest thing.

My friends, I have survived a proper pestilence these past ten days and am recovering so very slowly from sickness (even now, a bony cough rattles around in the thinness of my chest, I feel a bit hollow, smaller than usual, easily made weary).  But when I walked the mountain tonight, watched the dogs fly through the sagebrush and witnessed the colors of the world fall into dumbness and twilight I felt bright and spry and entirely myself.  I felt fully like me, once again, and it was a relief.  There’s so much to see outside right now, so much, in fact, that every moment I spend inside feels like a moment lost.  Spring is wild in me.  My very heartbeat is the sudden music of the meadowlarks.  The palms of my hands are creeping with green.  It seems resurrection is everywhere I look.  And I believe, I surely do.

——————————————

As I walked tonight, slowly, as though in an exquisite dream, the wind was raking its fingers through my hair and the mountain water tripping over itself and into the lawful, pulling hands of gravity, there was an edge of green peeking through the tawny gold of last years grasses, the sagebrush rubbing at its many eyes with sleepy fists.  My sight felt like thunder, brought forth on a crackle of light.  The sunset was silk and gold vapor, a shimmering yawn, the moan of a door hinge closing on day — reverence and brass.  I was utterly romanced by it all, swooning with love for all I could see.  Is this spring fever?  If so, I don’t want the cure.

These days feel like a pearl-snap shirt poking out from beneath the scratchy threads of an old wool sweater that has grown uncomfortably warm.  We let the wood stove die down to winking coals and fluttering ash.  We throw the windows open in our houses and let the wind pass through.  It is a beautiful time of year.  I read seed catalogues while I’m in the bath and daydream about gardening, fishing the Methow River and painting with my canvasses hanging from the trunk of a ponderosa pine tree at the Little Cabin In The Woods.

Spring is a time for dreamers.  Spring is a time for coming clean in the scrubbing scream of the wind.  Spring is for breaking free of the manacles of whatever cold thing that has been holding you far too tightly, for far too long.  I’m not even talking about ice and snow, I’m talking about other things, just as cold, that shrink and burn the spirit and nibble on your bones.  Cast it all off and begin anew.  This season gives full license to beginnings, limitless living, leaping forth into height and strength.  Upward.  Onward.

Dear hearts, oh, dear hearts.  Grow only hope, I will too.