I have come to view the weeks of spring with a greater sense of appreciation. As the snow fades and the green emerges from the ground I feel the cool air give way to warmth and listen to the birds announce life’s return to the trees. There is a kind of gentle hope in all of that, a hope that means more to me now that I realize there are more years behind than ahead, more days past than days to come.
Hope and spring allow me to endure the craziness of the world, the sense of the whole thing flying off its axis and spinning madly through space and time. More than anything else these days I’m simply sad at what I see around me, a great delusion with victims who have no idea of how to escape and transcend. I find myself caught up in it as well, drowning in a stormy sea and waiting for the Master to reach down and pull me from the waves. Yet, at least I know there’s a Master there and couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I didn’t. Such is the world these days, the world of headlines, 24 hour access, and a culture designed to make drones of us all.
Then spring comes and resurrection and a still, small, voice speaks with a clarity beyond the storm. Life begins anew. It always does. Crazy, bitter cold winters can wreak havoc with their temperamental winds driving us to huddle inside by any fire we have left to keep us warm. Yet they never last. Life, sanity, joy, better things, they always return. Sometimes, of course, there is much pain in the journey to that return, but the return, like spring, is inevitable.
One day my body, worn down by all the days that have passed will enter its winter slumber. One day the world around me will enter its night as well. Perhaps it already has. Yet I will rise and so will the world, both by the same force, the grace of God, God’s eternal spring which even death, the death of a person or the death of a culture, cannot overcome. What the birds in the trees announce now. the angels will then, and so the hope inside me never dies.
The Beautiful Path 