I love this time of year. I do. I was born just a few days before Spring and even as I grew up in a warm semi-tropical climate, I did not experience seasons for the first six years of my life, but my move to the mountains of Virginia revealed to me the great wonder that is Spring. There have been so many important hallmarks in my life that have involved Spring, from my own birth, to the births of others in my family as well as to significant events, all choosing to take place during this special window of time when the earth is beginning to loosen and open and awaken to new life. It is so special because, perhaps, it is also a brief happening. The buds come out in stages, then the trees all leaf out and then usually by May, its all fully unfolded. It is, though, a marvelous catalytic event that brings so much to us in so many ways. At least it is that way for me.
It isn’t just the spring flowers that are poking up. Its the buds that begin, even now, to begin their gradual greening and burgeoning. Its like this gentle but subtle movement to being. Pushed by growing daylight, carried by warming days, and made more fertile and possible by rain.
The new mystery flower buds up close
When awakening took a deeper turn in my life, I was awakened at four-thirty in the morning by a presence I had known about for years but who had suddenly made a re-entry into my life in a more active way, perhaps because my own inner sensing was more active by what awakening offered or brought. Now, to understand, I am a DEEP sleeper. So deep, in fact, that I used to need an alarm clock that would continually go off and insist that I get up, just to get up. Yes, I sleep deep. Its one of my super powers, actually! Waking up at four-thirty in the morning was simply not something I normally have been known to do. At all. And yet, this presence, an angel, actually, who had introduced himself again to me, seemed fond of getting me up at this same period during the mornings in order to administer some teaching or healing of one kind or another. This angel, who had roused me from my sleep, insisted that I go outside. “Go. Now.” he said. So I dutifully roused and got my clothes on enough to make the journey. Bleary-eyed, I stood at the back of my yard and wondered what was going on. I looked up at the still-night sky and waited for whatever it was that was so important.
He pointed me off in one direction and bid me look. I will explain what I mean by what it was that I saw when he told me to look….I was aware that my third-eye was active. I was seeing with my physical as well as inner eyes. Do you know this effect? It can happen when your eyes are closed and it feels as though you are looking through your closed eyelids. You get a definite sense of space. Something almost just behind your eyes opens up. There is a sense of expansiveness, of space every bit as real as what you sense with your physical eyes (except for me it actually feels more spacious than physical space—does that make any sense?). That is at least one symptom I can point to to describe what I was feeling/seeing. Okay, so you get the idea….so on with the narrative……As I did this, I saw a large hallways open up and I somehow knew that each door represented a lifetime. All these lifetimes. He then bade me pay attention to what was about to happen next. An odd thing took place! The hallways that opened up in front of me lifted up and turned, like how you might imagine how a large boat would sink in the ocean; the hallway just lifted upwards on its far end and suddenly was like a slide of sorts. I had the awareness of all of this material being shaken out of all of those lifetimes. The dross. All that was not necessary. Like a paper bag that you tilt up on one side to let all the material come falling out. He explained to me how this life was seminal in how this act would take place, that it was taking place and would continue to take place. THIS was THAT life!
So you might be asking yourself what this has to do with Spring. As I stood there, soaking this all up and waiting to see if there was anything more this being had to say to me, I then went back inside and went to my bed where I then fell fast asleep. It turned out that the day was Good Friday. At the time, I didn’t know that. The next day, as I rode through the mountains from the Blue Ridge Mountains where I live to the Alleghenies where I have my studio (I am only a few miles from this eastern continental divide), I noticed something that I had not noticed even the previous day, which was that as I came into the Allegheny side of things, everything was just beginning to get a haze of GREEN on all the trees. You know that look. It’s the first visible sign of Spring after all the early bulbs come up. The trees come in a little later. But this year, the trees all began to bud out a little earlier than usual. As I thought about all of this, the confluence of Spring, the trees, Good Friday, and my image of the many lifetimes being cleared out, I saw how it was that this was itself one giant opportunity for new life to emerge, for new beginnings to grow after a slumber of lifetimes. All of this, nature and us (who are a part of nature), are waking up just as all life awakens in the slim path of Spring. This, for me, is why I have loved Spring so much. It is new life! New beginnings, a chance around this Great Wheel. Each time, we can bear our shortcomings and seeming failures into the new opportunities that are being offered, which is as perennial as the grass, the hope that love instills on the greatest and the least of us…..which has the power to raise each of us to equal stature with all of our kin, sentient and non, on this planet.
And you might be wagging your finger here pointing out that “Good” Friday was a day when Jesus was Crucified. And well, yes, and so all of this has itself been a death. In the case of Jesus and with life here, death is followed by rebirth (for plants blooming, in a fashion, as well as for Jesus in his own drama so long ago). So a death, yes, for death itself was certainly turning in my life (and continues to do so) with the end being also the beginning. And so, as one dies, there is also this new life which I saw take place the very next day. Good Friday, itself, varies, so it is actually uncommon to see everything budding out in our part of the country so early. But it does happen, and it certainly happened almost as if by magic the next day. The promise of new life, continuity, rebirth, renewal.
It helps me to continually reflect how I can bring more healing, more growth, more new buds out into my own life, to make sense of the love both given and denied, in my life and to learn how to better hold all love in my life….since Spring is itself bestowed to us all just as the greatest of love is bestowed. But it is true, I think, that we each, including myself, can gain from being able to see things more clearly, less as we are and more as they are. Somehow, Spring seems to remind me of this, and it makes me hopeful even as Winter loosens it grip and gives us here in this region, at least, a taste of the turning seasons. Spring! Spring! Spring!
So it is that I regard Spring, celebrate it, welcome it, and breathe it in. Born into it, I am born out of it, and look forward to it to come once the leaves begin to fall and everything goes to slumber again.
I hope that you can breathe in this new life into yourself…to stand out in the still-cold grass and feel the pulse and flow that is beginning to leak out through all things. From here on out, it will be like a voice that will grow stronger and stronger….its spirit lies just beneath the ice, as drip drip drip, that ice slowly and gradually thaws. Me, I NEED it. Each time I pray for it to help me to understand more and more of my inner mysteries, old haunts and pains and mistakes and help me to realize them into new form. This, I think, for me, is part of the promise of Spring!
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Waking The Infinite 