Category: Spring
What does it mean to be “in process”?
The earth in our garden is ready for planting. How do I know? It looks like a “mess.” The cozy mulch of winter leaves has decomposed into wet clumps. Here and there chunks of soil push up in a riot of disorganized weeds and the compost is spilling out of its pen, bursting into lawns…
Opening your Doors Again
Last week I opened the doors to my house. It was a glorious early spring day, the hillsides were bursting with daffodils and a robin was singing, singing from a nearby tree. I’d opened the doors in winter, of course, but always in a hurried manner, holding them for a second while I hauled wood in from…
What Does this Spring Hold for You?
Lately, I’ve been waking up every morning to listen to the dawn chorus. The songbirds have returned—along with the flocks of spring flowers—and it’s thrilling, comforting, promising. Every spring I find myself embracing a tender belief in new beginnings. The flowers open and the hope I’d nearly given up returns like the songbirds. There is newness on…
What your Favorite Flower Says About You
I hadn’t stepped foot outside in weeks. Freshly post-partum, I’d been nestled in bed since my daughter’s birth. Since that time we’d already seen several snows, and at least one night when our pipes froze solid, but today the sun was shining. Today, the first daffodils were blooming, and every fiber of my body was yearning…
Why it’s Okay to Feel Everything
As beautiful as spring is, it doesn’t arrive gently. The transition from late winter into early spring is one of seesawing extremes. Freezing nights and warm afternoons; buckets of rain and the hard snap of ice. Lately, the changing moodiness of early spring seems to match the ebb and swell within me. Like most…
The Season of Pleasure
In the wheel of the year each season has its distinctive gifts, its own character and flavor. There is a time for hermitage and planting, harvesting, seeking, risking, budgeting and even dying. But it’s only in summer that pleasure takes center stage. Here in the mountains, we are just now tipping into the true…
A Flower Portal
Every spring is a kind of portal. An opening where absolutely everything has the possibility to change. When what was dormant can become activated in an entirely new way. Every winter I forget something of what it means to be alive, and every spring, in the softness of the mud and rain, I remember….
Awakenings Can Be Gentle
a·wak·en·ing Coming into awareness, a shift in consciousness, appreciating previously unseen aspects of reality, enlightenment. In our culture we have an enduring belief that awakenings, in order to be profound, must be hard won. That awakenings always tangle with struggle. That they will be dramatic, epiphanic, and arrive like a bolt of lightning….
