It may seem a bit cynical to say so, but sometimes I feel people need a bit of hell to appreciate heaven. One never appreciates sleeping past dawn as much as they do the first day boot camp is done. For this reason God may appear as cruel as a drill sergeant, or as callous as a surgeon who cuts to heal, until the moment one experiences being healed.
Spring is like a vast healing overtaking the entire earth, and defying the ordinary state of affairs where we see things get worn out. Ordinarily we expect stuff to get old and become obsolete and broken. Spring holds the bliss of a contrary way. I think that, in northern lands, people would become completely intoxicated and become quite useless and be unable to plant crops, and therefore God created biting black flies, to remind us we are not in heaven yet.
This spring seems especially beautiful because it took so long to get started. The daffodils seem especially perfect, because they had to wait so long to bloom they are not bitten by late frosts.
It has happened with stunning speed. One day I was spreading salt on the snowy walk and the next I am mowing grass. The road crews have flipped from plowing to putting up the Memorial Day flags.
The stark landscape is gentled too swiftly for the mind to capture or fully grasp.
Wherever you turn there are beautiful views, until I had trouble arriving on time because I had to stop so often to snap pictures of places I usually drove by without noticing.
And sometimes I feel I took a wrong turn and entered a new world. (Or perhaps a right turn.)
I’m two weeks late planting peas and potatoes and onions, but even in the garden I get reminders of healing. Among last year’s dead corn grows a mat of chickweed.
I did not labor to plant this crop, with its tiny blooms.
The old-timers said it was a cure for winter-dried skin and winter-clogged lungs. I gathered a gallon for dinner, (it shrinks a lot when boiled), musing to myself about how spring heals.
The more you draw, the farther the arrow flies,
And the more spring is delayed, the bluer
Are its skies, the greater your surprise,
As if you were a man who stepped from sewer
To paradise, or a damsel seeing a hero
Step from a gorilla disguise. Not all shock
Is trauma. Leaping to jackpot from zero
May drop gamblers, but winter’s thorny stalk
produced a rose of such sweet aroma
That scent became solid, a strange staircase
Climbing from garden through clouds, and such awe
Overwhelmed that no words can describe the place
Where ones mood climbed, except the poor word “bliss”.
Where one once was a worm: Metamorphosis.
Sunrise's Swansong 