This time of year, I follow light around the house like a puppy after its best friend. I am sun hungry, and I measure rays stretched across hardwood floors and count minutes of daylight like coins in a bank.
It’s easy to feel miserly, hoarding each minute of light, a bit bitter at the hours of darkness.
Much better to feel grateful and celebratory for the minutes I have. To delight in howsoever I choose to spend them.
I sit on the porch, cupping my tea, on watch as the sun recedes from view. Wrapped in a blanket against the increasing chill, I’m basking, sun on my face. Today’s last rays a deposit I took the time to make.
The light of faith and hope and prayer notwithinstanding, It is up to me, I think, to find my own light. Make my own light. Be my own light.
In a winter garden, I plan next season’s plantings. Reflecting carefully, of course, on last year’s harvest.
Now is the time for imagining the ideal. The time for optimistic enthusiasm before the rolling up of sleeves and the dirt of hard work and effort and hope collects under my fingernails. A season of dormancy. A renewal of strength, purpose, and spirit.
In this season of life and living, I’ll determine what’s important to plant. Which fields in my life to let lie fallow in rest. There’s preparation to be done. Research. Trust. Faith in the future. A belief in the cycles and pace of my own nature. Knowing the truth that all is as it should be: living in the cold, wind, and darkness of winter as necessary precursors to light, warmth, and germination.
I winnow through expectations, weeding out what I’ve got to let go. Sow starter seeds, watchful for what takes root. Which seeds prosper? Which seeds – promising as they may be – were never really meant for my own little patch of soil? Some seeds, I know, only sprout after repose.
How will I nourish myself? Gather strength? Coax growth?
In a winter garden, I reap what’s happiest in today, hopeful tomorrow’s garden will grow in it’s time.
What a luxury to let dappled sunshine dry my hair this morning. Walking the rise of hills hurried my breath and released it again as those hills sloped back down. I crossed paths with a chipmunk and good morning-ed fellow walkers, all of us waving away the incessant deer flies.
Walking the dirt road today, I remembered other dirt roads, childhood roads, where I walked to school, never once thinking about anywhere other than right where I was. So I practiced that kind of presence today in honor of that girl I used to be.
Sweat bubbled on my nose and streaked across my forehead as I walked, only a hop, skip, and jump away from summer. There’s hope and happiness and freedom in summer, and I’m ever so happy to be out in it, grab ahold of it – deer flies and all.
I’m thankful for those who plant their gardens alongside the road for the pleasure and enjoyment of walkers-by like me. Roses climb a trellis while springtime pansies linger awhile longer under the mailbox. Chalk drawings in a driveway welcome summer as only a child just out of school can.
I want to remember this morning. Remember the breeze taking me by surprise and the glorious green surrounding me as I walk. There’s the swoop of a sparrow flying to rest on a fence post and the bounce of a robin across the neighbor’s front lawn.
Make no mistake – I saw that poison ivy spreading its way and growing alongside wild roses and the purple tufts of clover. So I’m reminded to admire not only the sunshine but the clouds too. I know rain sometimes ruins our plans and hopefully waters our plants – both. There’s the duality. Learning to savor the comings and goings, hellos and goodbyes, summers and winters. To spend these days wisely and aware.
Soon the sunflowers in the bed out back will stand taller than I do. Pumpkins will one day be ready to carve with our granddaughter. Summer’s car washes in the driveway will be replaced with new chores, with gathering, and nesting, layering and readying for rest.
But just for today, a warm breeze ruffles the ferns, tosses the buttercups, and distracts the bugs.
Circles and cycles. Bud and bloom. Belief and doubt. Celebration and grief.
Faith.
Move inward, out. Outward, in.
Still. Sacred. Spiritual.
A revolution, a resolution, a plan, a path, a prayer.
A journey.
Start here. Or there.
No destination in mind or notice of arrival. Back where I began, here I am returned. Again. Both renewed and changed by the experience of the walk itself, a guarantee that no matter how familiar the path, I am in fact a different person than I was the last time I walked it.
Spring too, here again. Another spin around for both of us. So familiar, but so new and ever hopeful. Both transformed and transforming.
From the one to the many. From the many to the one.
If you’re in want of a miracle, you need only visit New England in spring. You’ll find the glory you’re looking for in the unfurling of daffodils, the birth of wild violets, and the promise of lilacs. The splendor you seek will be discovered in a burst of forsythia alongside granite rock walls, and there’s something undeniably magical about the magnificence of a magnolia tree in bloom. We’re a ways past sugaring season – one of spring’s first miracles, and impatient as we are to plant in the garden, we welcome the soft purple velvet of pansies in a pot on the porch.
I’ve yet to see Canada geese, though I’ve heard a few honks. The turkey toms are all strut and nonsense out back by the chicken coop where the girls are laying regularly again. So many birds are back, and on my walk I hear a towhee whistle, a repetition I’ve gone so long without. There’s a persistent drill of a woodpecker somewhere off in the distance, and I feel almost dizzy with gratitude to be outside and warm again.
There’s a particular patch of peach daffodils out front of a favorite old farmhouse I walk past. I wait all year for their bloom. No blooms yet, but I know there’s a measured pace and pattern to growing. Just as I know the apple trees blossom sometime around Mother’s Day and the peonies a week or so after that, I know nature takes its own sweet time with no regard for human opinion or hope. Those peach daffydowndillies are late bloomers is all, and if pleasures like these awoke all at once, they’d be done and over, there and gone before I knew it. Too much, too soon is never a good thing.
Beyond the old farmhouse I can hear the rush and tumble of a usually slow and humble creek all proud and boisterous after this week’s Nor’easter. I’m on the watch for baby ducks paddling single file in the quieter water below the falls, or if we’re lucky, maybe some goslings too. Just to smell fresh water and first-mown grass feels almost impossible somehow. Wasn’t it snowing and cold only yesterday?
My silly watch measures my walk and my much slower-than-normal pace, once in awhile messaging: Are you done with your workout? I’m sure it wonders why on earth I’m walking so slowly.
As if that requires explanation.
I’m witness to the greening of grass, the golding of weeping willows, and the arrival of a New England spring. A privilege. A blessing. A miracle.
one hopeful year 