Spring Life

The day began with rain and chill, but as evening approaches, the sky is clear. The sun is so bright it bleaches the blue out of the heavens. Behind the houses, the trees have filled out their foliage. They are no longer skeletons, but living bodies; no longer ink sketches on a white sky, but a moving painting, green and gold and amber, and all the shades in between. In the evening breeze, the leaves shimmer, shadows shifting. The windows are open, and neighborhood chatter drifts in from the sidewalk, women's voices, exchanging news in Spanish.

When the sun falls through the window like this--, when Spanish chatters on the breeze like this,-- when the sky is cloudless like this: I feel at home. This is my home, the sunlight. This is my home, the sky. These are my myriad homes, the shifting leaves, with evening light gilding them. Sometimes this city feels like exile, and this winter, mild as it was, felt like death. But spring is come again, the sun is shining again, the sky gives itself to me again, and this, this feels like life.

Spring Showers

On the city streets, the sidewalk trees are white and green. Their flowers are falling now. Every eddy of wind brings down a new drift of white petals. These settle slowly as snowflakes, strange in the sunlight. The day is bright and warm, weather for bare arms and bare feet. Yet drifts of white lie in the gutters and swirl in the street--spring's farewell to winter.

Spring Leaves

Washing dishes, I looked out the window--and the trees were green! The starkness of bare branches is yielding, day by day, to the complexity of leaves. Yesterday, discreet buds emerged. Today, they burst open. Tiny tender leaves, intricately curled and crumpled, complicated the outline of the tree. I no longer notice its black branches against the neighbor's white house. I no longer notice the house at all. I just see the leaves.

Even if the robins weren't chirping all day long, I would know that it is spring.

Spring

It's been almost a month since I posted. I think that means I need to post almost every day until the end of the month, which might be difficult because Spring has arrived! The sky is blue again. The trees burst into blossom and put out twists of leaves. In the park, the male pigeons strut about puffed up like turkeys, dragging their stiffened tails on the ground. The female pigeons turn their backs and walk away, pecking at the grass. (I don't have to play those games any more, and for this too I am so grateful.)

Thank God for sunshine burning hot, for the softening of tree branches bare for so long; for the darting sparrows, the strutting pigeons; for squirrels popping out from behind tree trunks, streaming across the grass; for the promise of green whispering leaves, for the memory of their shifting shadows and of the light that percolates through the verdant canopy, falling at last to mark the ground with overlapping circles of sun; for the arrival of Spring, for the nearness of Summer; for the covenant that the Seasons will keep turning, that Spring will never not come, that night will never be eternal; for the endurance of Life and for the end of sleep and cold and death; for Life and Light; for Himself.

Spring is capricious this year

Has it really been twenty days since I posted anything here? How sadly I have neglected thee, o my blog.

Spring came, and spring left, spring leapt away like a deer vanishing into the trees, irretrievable. Chasing after it does no good. Like a child crying at every inevitable loss, I cried when spring abandoned me to winter again, and I whined and whined about the rain.

But like the deer who returns at dusk to nibble delicately and destructively at your garden, spring has returned, again. Spring has come bounding in so many times, and then has gone bounding out just as many times... But I think spring is here to stay this time. I really hope so. (Spring, did you hear that? Don't leave me again, don't break my heart by only staying one day. You have my hopes up now: two days of sun, light, warmth, the promise of sweat.)

It's almost May and the tulip trees are blossoming. The dandelions are out, biting my bare feet. The grass is still a swamp from yesterday's thunderstorm, but it shone in the hot sun all day today. I have high hopes for tomorrow.

Sonnet-esque

Elegance/Increase

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
when timid leaves, pale green or red, do sprout
from tree-tips stretching skyward as the cold
winter withdraws—Spare elegance, I leave thee.
Grace of branches bared to the blue sky,
I leave thee. Leaves shall clothe me:
chaos of foliage, riot of increase, of life
profuse, protruding—extending, exploding—
growing greener, greater, and singing in the wind
and sun, as spring comes, comes out shyly
from the tender tree-tips. Crisp blank snow,
silent still ice, I leave thee; creeping greening
bursting beginning rustling hustling
falling flying Spring, I greet thee.

[2/12/11]

I'm taking a poetry workshop, and for this week's assignment, I ended up writing three independent poems in the process of trying to express the idea I had landed on--singleness as "that which I must leave ere long." As given away by that quotation and by my poem's first line, Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 was echoing in my head as I wrote this. And then it worked out that it has the requisite 14 lines to be a sonnet.

I didn't bring this poem in to workshop (it was draft 2 of 3), but I showed it to my professor and he called it "good exercise," which (like his lavish compliments of draft 1, not posted here) was an unexpected reaction. He says writing to the seasons is something that one should do, especially if one is a Californian living temporarily in a place with real seasons; but he seems to think that seasonal poems are not poetic/personal/ownable or something in the same way that properly lyric poems are...

Anyway, there is my spring poem, rippling along the surface of my feelings about the major life changes that are coming, as surely as the seasons.

Melt

A few days ago, everything was ice. The snow was a sheet of glass, icicles dangled from the streetlamps. The sidewalks were scarred with salt.

Today, everything is melting. "It's spring, and the world is puddle-wonderful." Mud smiles everywhere. For the first time in months, the grass sees the sun. The snow is naked again. It is disintegrating into heaps of lace.

It's still weather for a wool coat, but it's time to throw it open and welcome in the wind.

"Let the rain fall down"

The sky blazed blue for five frenetic days, and I skipped and spun and sang in the sun. I soaked my skin in sunshine. Every ray injected light into my body, photons bouncing around inside my skin. Inside I was glowing and burning.

And now the rain has returned. Clouds cover the sky, softening the inconceivable void to a quiet blanket. The mist collects in diamond drops. They hang on the slender branches of winter-bare trees, and on the white petals of the hopeful spring blossoms. The light lands on them, silver.

And the mist brushes my face, like soothing whispers.

Shh. Listen to the rain.

The gathered droplets slide down dampened tree-skin, they run clattering down the drainpipes and dance on the rooftops, they leap to the ground. Finally they convene in puddles, where the air currents caress them. The puddle-skin shimmers and shivers. Branches and clouds stare up from its face. In the eye of the puddle, the whole world rests.

Spring Rain

The prayer I want to have always pouring through my heart:

Let us acknowledge the Lord.
Let us press on to acknowledge Him.
As surely as the sun rises, He will appear;
He will come to us like the winter rains,
like the spring rains that water the earth.
(Hosea 6:3)

I feel the spring coming, at long last. After the snow, the rain fell and washed away the illusion. Spring rain or winter rain? Who cares, so long as the rain waters the earth! The rain waters me, too, though I don't absorb it with the grace of the trees. I can't drink the rain, and it doesn't nourish my body. But I am umbrella-less this year--I am soaking in the rain. It seeps into my skin, and I feel as drenched as the earth. Footsteps on my skin would squish.

I want to be that soaked in God's presence.

Come, like the sun and like the rain, like warmth and water, like light and cloud. Rain and sun together make the world so bright, polished and gleaming and reflecting. Every puddle mirrors the sky, every tree is lacquered. Raindrops like rhinestones refract the light from every leaf and stem. Even the buildings are rejuvenated, washed clean.

In the rain, I am cold and sorrowful, clenched into myself (though really I am leaking into the world and the world is seeping into me, with each sliding droplet). But the sun appears and its rays split me wide open and I spill out into the sky.

Come, sun and rain, and make me into a rainbow.

And there was much rejoicing.

Today, I was walking to buy breakfast, and it hit me: springtime.

I promise, I've been paying attention all along. I've noticed a tree white with flowers here, and there another blushing pink and purple, and by this road a burst of daffodils, and in that garden tulips like flames. I have not been immune to the sun's growing strength, and the wind's new gentleness. But each moment has seemed like an isolated occurrence. Added together, I could string them like beads into a necklace to ward off winter. Still, spring was a talisman, a charm, an icon, a picture--something to look at or not, to wear around my neck or put in a drawer. Today, though, spring escaped the strings and drawers, and leapt out of its frame. It swirled around me and I saw suddenly that it was everywhere.

When the weather turns from nasty to nice as it has in the past few days, I know in my bones why the line goes "Now is the winter of our discontent." It is easy to be discontent when the gray sky looms close overhead and the wind shrieks around the building and claws at you when you venture outside. It is easy to be depressed when twilight sucks the day away at four in the afternoon.

But when the sun is warm on your skin, and the trees soften their stark silhouettes with so many small blossoms--when the wind croons instead of screeching, and dances across the new leaves--when the grass is green, not gray--when the robins skip and flirt--when the sky is sapphire blue after a late dinner: it is easy to be happy. And I am.

Spring Break

I would like to always face the sky. The clouds would cry for me, and the sun would smile for me. The wind would be my voice; I would never have to search for words. Instead of deciding and deciding and deciding, I would just grow. I would sink my roots deep, and drink whatever came my way.

Leaves

[So I've been neglecting this blog dreadfully, and I would like to announce now that I plan to neglect it for another 2 weeks and then resume being diligent about writing. I have stuff to figure out that belongs in a journal, and places to go that do not have internet (i.e., the beach).]

In the mean time:
I am watching the buds escape from their wooden prisons, the slim ends of the tree-branches. They poke green faces into the cool moist air. Soon the leaves will unfurl, and cover the tree's nakedness. The sun is warm these days, though the wind is still cold: I know spring is here, even though hundreds of spiky seed-cases still decorate the entire tree, like dangling Christmas ornaments.

Quelques Bagatelles

The Ackermann function isn't very interesting to compute by hand. I guess if I were a real programmer, I would have written a program to compute and print out the 2 values my homework asks for...

In other news, the robins are out, so even though the air temperature is barely above freezing, I think it's spring.

Ducklings

I saw ducklings today, swimming along after their mother. They skittered across the surface of the water like leaves blown by the wind. They are bits of golden fluff, striped with brown and spiked from the wet. How does that fuzz turn into sleek feathers? How do those skimpy waving nubs become spreading wings? Their mother is so much bigger than they are, like a creature of another species. I do not remember the days when my mother towered over me like an invincible fortress. We are the same size now, and I am no more breakable than she is.

The swans were at the mill pond, too, white and gracious like angels on the water, with their cygnets between them. On the lawn, the Canada geese were herding their grazing babes, yellow on green. I never knew so many birds deigned to dawdle with their young in the domain of the earthbound humans.

Light

Seven thirty, and it's still light outside. The sky is luminous blue. Small birds flit across the expanse, black drops against cloud-brushed sapphire. Behind me, orange tints the horizon where dusk is creeping up through the still-barren trees. Springtime has strengthened the sun. Light fills the air still, gleams and glows.

And I too am light. I was a dark drop of despair, plunging through endless space--but the sun shone through me, piercingly, and now: I have evaporated, am drifting in the warm air. I will not fall.

There is a lightness in me, a clarity at my core. My heart floats, steady, steady. I breathe in, and it seems the whole sky dwells for a moment within the vault of my ribs. Breathe in, and it seems for a moment I rise off the ground, that the sky lifts my weight. The balls of my feet touch the earth, but no weight rests on them. Breathe in. Breathe in, and the sun shines on my cold heart.

And breathe out and come back to the world.

The sky releases me, lowering me carefully. I am, again, my small self. But the sun is still shining, and the naked trees are putting out hopeful, knobbly buds.