Dreamstate

Inner and outer landscapes

When we finally return from our long exile, we will awaken like dreamers. — Psalm 126

Somewhere, cherry blossoms unfurl their tender petals under a Hokusai sky.

Somewhere, spring is working her endless enchantments.

Yet, some still sleep, fast within winter’s fortress of solitude.

A blizzard is upon us; a windblown river of snow. I watch it gust and bluster, hypnotized, that old song playing in my head.

Moving through time in a dreamstate from which I hardly awaken, even as I shovel towering pancakes of snow, and tweak my back, and the sideways flakes softly trace my flushed face with meltwater, out of concern.

Folded up and sealed in winter’s cold envelope, once again.

I bake a pan of brownies and eat four of them.

I wonder, what it is called; this sensory sympathy that aligns my emotional state with the manifestations of seasons and sky? For winter leads me into a dreaming den, from which I peer out at the long unspooling of whiteness; becoming unanchored, dissolving into the blizzard. A most inconvenient sort of empathy.

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A blizzard is upon us. The first of the red-winged blackbirds have already returned to the wetlands. Are they huddled now under a tangle of dried reeds? Protected within snow caverns melted by their own breath? I cannot bear to imagine them perishing for their bravery.

Five days from the spring equinox, a blizzard is upon us, a grandfather snowstorm that insists, Winter.

The ice had melted. Now seven inches of snow blanket the ground.

The waxing Sun replies, Spring.

The Sun says that he is making ceremony. He is dividing day and night into equal parts; half for waking and half for dreaming.

All things must pass, including Winter, declares the Sun.

He tells the story of how, in another place — where it is already spring — the fine sparkle of ice crystals has been remade into the shimmer of a hummingbird’s feathers.

I know that this is true.

The Sun cannot lie; stars never can.

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As I wait out the blizzard, I make up similes for spring’s most entrancing qualities.

A prismatic hummingbird, darting in and out of vision.

A rain-eyed paeon singer.

Radiant-thunderstorm-then-rainbow, whiff of river mud and blossom.

A silver bracelet, hung with opals and owl charms.

There, spring flickers; over at the edge of dawn. Remember spring? For a handful of days, she called us by name; then vanished, like Yeats’s glimmering girl.

Anyone living landlocked, in the center of a continent, recognizes these old tricks; winter’s unreasonable persistence, spring’s fickleness and inconstancy, the messy breakup between the two.

As we grow older, we begin to understand that neither season nor anything else we long for is beholden to our longings and timelines.

We come to see that spring, like life, is not guaranteed but gifted to us. Rising up greenly from the Earth, reaching down to us in a benevolence of sunlight, singing in the meltwater, life singing through us too, even when we think we are beyond it, when we think we are too worn, too worried, too sad, too old; even then, especially then, when we most need life and hope, can we feel that faint echo singing in our blood, and remember that we are, once again, most gloriously alive, alive after a long winter, in a miraculous season of gifts.

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An Alberta clipper sprinkled us with more snow on Tuesday. As recently as yesterday, I was sweeping it from my front steps in the morning, like a babushka.

Now snow is dimpling, dipping, subsiding into shrinking islands and peninsulas, soaking slowly into thawing soil (though I suspect it will be back for an encore).

On the threshold of spring, at last I crawl forth from my cave, shielding my eyes against the dazzling light.

The Sun is delivering on his promise (he cannot lie). Water chimes from roof and branch. Change is in the air.

I take a deep breath.

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