Winter is making way for a new season here in central Connecticut. Tiny green tips of garlic and crocus and snowdrops are emerging wherever the March sun has melted February's blanket of snow and ice. Like the plants in my garden, I am beginning to emerge into the first warm rays of spring sun. I am emerging from a long winter of enforced quiet and distance and isolation. I feel hope stirring as I hear the mourning doves coo and meadow larks trill from the tree tops.
Every year winter scours my garden and leaves it altered. Some plants die, others are broken by heavy weather. The land lays naked with all its dimples and scars on display. I see what needs tending, what needs healing. I see what my actions over the last years have wrought: the good and the bad. There are no beautiful flowers or veils of green to distract me. I see what is, and how I need to change if I am to continue to nurture and heal this little speck of the world.
The pandemic we are beginning to emerge from has scoured our social landscape as surely as the brutal winter weather changes the land. It has laid bare our need for one another. It has exposed the sins of the past and their bitter-fruits of inequity, poverty, hate and fear. We can see (if we are brave enough to look) what our actions, and complicit-silence, have wrought.
This pandemic has altered me in ways I am only beginning to comprehend. I understand more deeply my need for connection and ritual. I say more and speak less. I want fewer things and desire more experience. I have become more creative and generative and (I hope) more generous. I am changed, and the world is changed, too. May Wisdom guide me as I step out my back door and onto the paths of this beautiful, aching world. May it be so for us all.
Courage my dears.