the challenge of our emerging spring...

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.
~ May Sarton. Read more in SELECTED POEMS OF MAY SARTON

Today is drizzling, gray, and covered in mist. On a "sanity drive" through the hills, woods, and backroads this weekend, Di spoke of March as a liminal time: it is a clear portal of hope where we transition from the darkness of winter into the light of spring. It is like November - just going in the opposite direction. Intuitively, she hates the journey into darkness - and November - while I am enraptured by it. Those days between All Hollow's Eve and the start of Advent unlock something within me and I come alive. Conversely, I'm ambivalent about March and have been wondering why?

Gazing upon the wetlands right now I think it has to do with the messiness of this month: as the snow retreats into the drizzle, the detritus of winter is revealed. All that mud. And dog poop. All that decaying clutter on the ground that must be allowed to remain so that insects and soil can prosper from its demise. I enjoy the lengthening of the days, don't get me wrong, and look forward to getting back into the soil, plants, and garden, too. But aesthetically and emotionally, I tend towards dusk rather than dawn. I come alive at night and revel in it's mystery. Most days, I could sleep till noon, work through the afternoon, and explore the realm of music and art after the sun goes down. I do enjoy a good sunrise. I appreciate the revelations that take place in the light, too. But by nature my soul is nocturnal. 

I can't find the source at the moment, but earlier today I read someone's opine that sunsets look more graceful than a sunrise. More measured. Mystical. More nuanced. That feels true to me even in it's subjectivity. But as another said about the snow: it's going to be here whether I love it or not so why not learn to go with the flow? March is calling me towards rapproachement with reality. I will never be as jolly as St. Mary Oliver in her poem, "Why I Wake Early."

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and crotchety-

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light-
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

But I need not be a grumblestiltskin either: there is mystery in the movement into daylight if I am willing to see it. A prayer poem Padraig O'Tuama crafted for the Corrymela Community puts it like this:

God said, 'There will be dreams from the night that will need the light of the morning.' And so God put wisdom in the early hours... God said: 'Let there be a certain kind of light that can only be seen in the morning.' And God created gold, and dew, and horizons, and hills in the distance, and faces that look different in the light of the morning, and things that look different in the light of the morning... And God said that it was Good.

I am thinking, too of Rumi's wisdom when he wrote "Who Makes These Changes?

Who makes these changes?
I shoot an arrow right.
It lands left.
I ride after a deer and find myself
Chased by a hog.
I plot to get what I want
And end up in prison.
I dig pits to trap others
And fall in.

I should be suspicious
Of what I want.

Already, beyond the dog poop and mud, there is a hint of reds and purples popping up within the drizzle. It seems that the all encompassing gray highlights rather than hides this subtle beauty too easily lost in the frost. And now I have two native seed gardening catalogs to peruse and make some choices about this year's bounty. "And God said that it was good!" The wise Celtic theologian, Eriugena, wrote: "For the end of every movement is its beginning: that from which it was first moved, and to which it always longs to return, so there it may rest and be at peace." 

Rumi also puts it like this:    

I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was human,
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die human,
To soar with angels blessed above.
And when I sacrifice my angel soul
I shall become what no mind ever conceived.
As a human, I will die once more,
Reborn, I will with the angels soar.
And when I let my angel body go,
I shall be more than mortal mind can know.