Once again
the miracle is happening! All those bleak and frozen days are melting
and the first haze of soft green drifts across the top of winter bare
trees. A few days of sunshine and warmth have aroused the promise secreted
away in the darkness of earth and now - everywhere we look - brilliant
sunshine, shaped like forsythia bushes, suddenly sits up and stretches
flowery arms skyward. Once again, despite the worst of winter pessimism
Spring has come through for us.
I am waiting for rainbows - when I was a little girl I believed that
rainbows soaked in to the ground and that is how flowers got their color.
As though the angels were pouring color through the sky and I was just
lucky enough to be there to see it. Even now when I see the soft pinks
and violets, yellows and blues of tulips and hyacinths shyly peeping
through shoots of green I suspect that there is a rainbow I must have
missed.
I think I am a pessimist by nature. I always think that unless I manage
the entire situation and handle every detail everything will go wrong
and then it will be all my fault. I think that is why Spring is so reassuring
to me - it forces me to remember that the beauty and the color and the
sweetest of fragrances are all there - maybe not visible just at this
moment but there nonetheless. All I have to do is step back and wait.
My grandmother used to say that loving someone was a little like planting
bulbs in autumn. You do this thing - you let another enter your heart,
you put a flower bulb in to the earth - and then you have to let go
and believe in the natural order of things. If you keep digging the
bulbs up to check on them you aren’t going to have much of a flower
garden. It becomes a matter of trust in the goodness - of nature - and
of the one who has won your willingness to believe in them.
Recently a friend reminded me of a beautiful passage from Rilke: “How
should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are the beginnings
of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn
into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything
terrible is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help
from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before
you larger than you have ever seen; if a restiveness like light and
cloud-shadows, passes over you and over all you do. You must think that
something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you - that
it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall.”
I write a lot about the fragile beauty of love. And about the possibility
that each loving opportunity holds for us to stretch beyond our limited
views of ourselves and of our notions of what love is. More than anything
love is faith. Faith in the rightness of our perception of a person.
Faith in our own capacity to rise above the obvious and the predictable.
And, more than that, faith in our own beauty, faith that we deserve
to love and to be loved.
In some ways all the popular romance attached to love does us no favors
- it is rather like watching a movie about Spring instead of walking
out of our doors and taking a deep breath and feeling the warmth of
sunlight on our faces through the lingering winter chill in the air.
Everything is condensed and heightened and “enhanced” with
special effects in movies. But real life isn’t like that - real
life has its peculiar little rhythms and seasons. It’s disappointments
and its quiet times. One day it is chill and dark and then a ray of
sunlight illuminates a bright green shoot poking out of the dark ground
and we remember.
With each Spring I seem to become a little more comfortable with dragons
- more capable of seeing the princess beneath the fangs and scales.
Maybe even more capable of being the princess. With each Spring I become
a little more willing to believe that all those tenderly planted bulbs
slumbering down there are doing their best to emerge so brave and beautiful
into the growing light. They don’t need me to run the job. As
my friend Rose always says, “God is on the case.”
Outside my window a tulip tree offers a voluptuous profusion of creamy
white petals edged in shocking pink bursting out of branches that not
so many days ago were shivering under a layer of snow. The cloud shadow
restiveness of winter has passed. Something has happened - once again
Spring has not forgotten us. Our faith in life and our faith in love
hold us in its hands and will not let us fall.
