I need a tonic, a revivification, a rebirthing.
It is like this, in spring.
I seek everywhere water flows, its voice unlocked by spring — the creeks, the rivers, the lakes — feeling my way toward my own ritual of renewal.
I touch my brow with river water, for awakening. If only I could feel my blood rising like sap, my heart greening with chlorophyll, leaves pushing from my mouth like a Green Man. I want to feel like springtime incarnate.
If I knew an evocation to call forth rain, I would speak it. Even a land of ten thousand lakes is in drought after a dry summer, dry autumn, a winter of little snow. The river islands with their stands of cottonwoods should be half-submerged in swirling races of meltwater.
Instead, the Mississippi has withdrawn into her deeper channels, leaving her rocky bed exposed.
In place of March mud and ice, is cracked soil. It will not bind together when squeezed in my palm, but sifts between my fingers like sand.
March has forgotten how to be March (blizzardy), just as February forgot how to be February (frigid) and January, January (subzero).
I miss all of these watery spring signs of my homeland. I cannot bring the rains. I cannot control anything, even what I dream of at night; but if I could, I would dream of days of slow, steady rain replenishing the ground, nourishing the marshes of spring peepers and chorus frogs, washing away all of our sorrows.
The green, though, does not worry about such matters. The green, it accepts what is and gets on with emerging from March’s gray-brown landscape all the same, in spite of, regardless.
I seek out signs of early spring, and find the silky-haired stems of the prairie’s earliest flower, blooming a delicate lilac in the straw-colored grass.
Down in the glen, amid the water meadows next to the creek, rise the shining, curved horns of scarlet skunk cabbage flowers, as yet bare of their lovely, funneled foliage.
Pussy willow pops gray-furred buds in the wetland, on the way to flowering to supply the first Queen bumble bees.
Because, despite the drought, the losses and extinctions, we find it is still present — this glamour, this beguilement Earth works upon us, life calling to life. If we cannot see it head on, we may still catch its glitter from the edges of our vision.
In March, this magic is often winged.
A brilliant bluebird pair who swoop singing on the woodland edges above the creek, delighting my color-starved eyes.
The hammering of prehistoric pileated woodpeckers, echoing through the trees as it has echoed for a million springtimes.
A pair of inquisitive trumpeter swans, who push open a channel through the ice so they can greet me (possibly seeking handouts).
The broad-winged shadow of the eagle, which passes between me and the sun … and is gone.
Great blue herons begin to arrive at their rookery in the Mississippi. On the sandbar, where grow tall cottonwoods festooned with giant nests, rest four of these magnificent beings. Three sleep standing, wings cupped about themselves like fringed shawls. The fourth heron sun-bathes, balancing one-footed on the bare trunk of a downed tree, while slowly scratching his gorgeous gray-blue chest feathers with the other foot.
I watch them through binoculars, in a cold wind. When I return in a couple of weeks, more herons, along with their white egret friends, will be sailing majestically from river to bank and back again, gathering sticks and grasses to reinforce their nests.
I bless them.
The power of a self-styled dryad to bless the herons and the river and the spring itself may be questioned; but I bless them with all my heart, just the same.
Everything is ephemeral.
Everything we love, everything we want to stay, changes.
I feel this most strongly in spring. My fear of missing out is fully activated.
Wait! I think. Stop moving so fast, stop changing, I want to be with you, I want you to stay here. How human it is to feel this pre-grieving of loss, the shadow side of loving. When it is ephemerality itself that is the most beautiful, heart-filling and heartbreaking thing about spring, and life.
Spring, and life, would lose their preciousness, their meaning, their very ways of being, if they remained fixed, unchanging.
Our choice, now and always, is to be present, and joyful as the birds, as it all unfolds.
Writing to you from the edge of spring,
Carmine
Spring is a wonder. It is all of the elements you have brought our attention to through your words and photos. Most of all, change just as you note. There is energy that thrums everywhere, and into us also. I love seeing the birds return, the leaves peeping out and unfurling, the grasses and flowers that reappear. In the Bear Paw Mountains of north central Montana where I grew up, the wild crocuses (pasque flowers) and pussy willows were the first to emerge. Then the meadowlarks, and we knew spring had arrived. Thank you once again for your insights and for truly seeing.
Such truth here … 🪻