So strange, life is. Why people do not go around in a continual state of surprise is beyond me. ~William Maxwell
If I stop and really look at something I usually pass by with only a cursory glance, I am astonished at what I didn’t see before.
Inside and up close is an unfamiliar richness and strangeness, as if of a foreign world, that I might miss altogether if I didn’t find the time to be surprised by life.
It is beyond me how much is beyond me.
It is all beyond me.
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning ~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Spring”
poplar row behind the apple orchard
Awake! Awake! for the earliest gleam Of golden sunlight shines On the rippling waves, that brightly flow Beneath the flowering vines. Awake! Awake! for the low, sweet chant Of the wild-birds’ morning hymn Comes floating by on the fragrant air, Through the forest cool and dim; Then spread each wing, And work, and sing, Through the long, bright sunny hours; O’er the pleasant earth We journey forth, For a day among the flowers.
~Louisa May Alcott Lily-Bell and Thistledown Song I
a favorite rhododendron
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what. ~John Galsworthy
a happy day put out to pasture
At morn when light mine eyes unsealed
I gazed upon the open field;
The rain had fallen in the night —
The landscape in the new day’s light
A countenance of grace revealed
Upon the meadow, wood and height.
The sun’s light was a smile of gold,
Ere shut by sudden fold on fold
Of surging, showering clouds from view;
No sooner hid than it broke through
A tearful smile upon the wold
Where earth reflected heaven’s blue.
The sky was as a canvas spun
To paint the new spring’s nocturns on;
A blended melody of tints —
The sea’s hue, and the myriad hints
Of garden-closes, when the sun
Hath stamped the work of nature’s mints.
~William Stanley Braithwaite
a happy day put out to blue skies in the breezerosemary
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and green world all together, Star-eyed strawberry breasted Throstle above Her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within, And bird and blossom swell In sod or sheath or shell.” – Gerard Manley Hopkins, The May Magnificat
Kale going to seed
“A delicate fabric of bird song Floats in the air, The smell of wet wild earth Is everywhere. Oh I must pass nothing by Without loving it much, The raindrop try with my lips, The grass with my touch; For how can I be sure I shall see again The world on the first of May Shining after the rain?” – Sara Teasdale, May Day
grape hyacinth and tulips
“Every spring is the only spring – a perpetual astonishment.” – Ellis Peters
“Some will tell you crocuses are heralds true of spring Others say that tulips showing buds are just the thing Point to peonies, say when magnolia blossoms show I look forward to the sight of other flowers though Cultivate your roses, grow your orchids in the dark Plant your posies row on row and stink up the whole park The flower that’s my favourite kind is found throughout the land A wilting, yellow dandelion, clutched in a grubby hand.” – Larry Tilander, Springtime of My Soul
“Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; And give us not to think so far away As the uncertain harvest; keep us here All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night; And make us happy in the happy bees, The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.” – Robert Frost, A Prayer in Spring
skimmia
“Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.” – Carl Sandburg
yew pollen
“With the coming of spring, I am calm again. “ – Gustav Mahler
the first of dozens of peonies
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
~Anton Chekhov
Virginia Creeper starting to do its creeper thing
Canadian mountains to the north
“This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze.” – D. H. Lawrence, The Enkindled Spring
“The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day. When the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, a cloud come over the sunlit arch, And wind comes off a frozen peak, And you’re two months back in the middle of March.” – Robert Frost
spring sunrise over Mt Baker
“Hark, I hear a robin calling! List, the wind is from the south! And the orchard-bloom is falling Sweet as kisses on the mouth.
Come and let us seek together Springtime lore of daffodils, Giving to the golden weather Greeting on the sun-warm hills.” – Lucy Maud Montgomery, Spring Song
“If you’ve never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.” – Audra Foveo
Sam stops to smell the tulips
“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” – Mark Twain
someone is looking his age….it was a rough winter
“Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.” – Dorothy Parker 😉
As if living in a prayer, we say amen to the late arrival of red, the stun of green, the muted yellow at the end of every twig. ~Jack Ridl from “Here in the Time Between”
Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed Their snow-white blossoms on my head, With brightest sunshine round me spread Of spring’s unclouded weather, In this sequestered nook how sweet To sit upon my orchard-seat! ~William Wordsworth
Sequester has a different meaning these days — a “take no prisoners” government withholding of funds it hadn’t collected to begin with.
I prefer the “hidden away for safe-keeping” definition — exactly how I feel when I walk into the orchard. I am cloistered in blossoms exuberant with potential.
Sequestered nook. Words and times change but the essence of spring’s promise never does.
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. – Rainer Maria Rilke
Thank God
the earth remembers the meter and rhythm of spring
and annually recites it from memory:
the tease of sun
warming cheeks,
a lapse back
into rain storms,
bulbs bursting
through frost,
surprised by snowflakes
maybe ice,
then a rainbow
through slanted light,
a few hardy buds
swell to blossom,
bees buzz sleepy,
all the while more rain,
painting green, always green
growing burgeoning flourishing.
The poem of earth reciting spring
declines to force a rhyme,
its buried words watered warm
to blossom just in time.
…every year the dull and dead in us meets our Easter challenge:
to be open to the unexpected, to believe beyond our security, to welcome God in every form, and trust in our own greening. ~Joyce Rupp from Out of the Ordinary: Prayers, Poems, and Reflections for Every Season
The challenge is to go
back to an every day routine
as if nothing has happened
when everything has happened.
There is laundry to do
floors to mop
patients to comfort
barns to clean
taxes to pay.
Nothing seemingly has changed
yet everything is changed.
Now I know why,
though dead and pruned,
I now sprout green ~
I am alive only
because He is.
“So fair, so cold; like a morning of pale spring still clinging to winter’s chill.” ~ J.R.R Tolkien
Clear and sunny skies on the second day of spring were full of deception today — no warmth emanates from a dimming sunlight stark with shocking briskness from a chill wind.
It’s all show without actually delivering the goods. We have clawed our way out of winter, trying to shake off the frost and leave it far behind, seeking out encouraging sightings of buds and blooms and blossoms.
Maybe tomorrow morning, or perhaps the next.
Just maybe.
Or not.
Twin Sisters from our farm hill, photo by Emily Gibson
Late February days; and now, at last, Might you have thought that Winter’s woe was past; So fair the sky was and so soft the air.
The happy birds were hurrying here and there,
as something soon would happen… – William Morris from Earthly Paradise
We’ve had a pair of bald eagles who return every winter to our hilltop farm. They like the high perches offered by our tall Douglas fir trees providing them a 360 degree view of the surrounding countryside and fields. I suspect their nest is nearby, if not in our woods. They were back today, full of conversation and gossip, chittering back and forth like a couple of sparrows, only much louder and much much bigger/grander. The regular inhabitants of our fir trees — crows and red-tailed hawks — are quite put out at the encroachment of eagles on their territory. They fly about the trees angrily, with scolding and harassing calls.
But the eagles reign wherever they set down talons. There is simply nothing to argue about. My only worry about having them in the yard is how vulnerable our cats might be when the wild bunny pickings get thin. Otherwise I appreciate the eagles for the good neighbors they are. They keep the rodent population under control, they are polite and don’t throw raucous parties at night, and they have a stable long term marriage, something I deeply respect.
So when their chirpy dialogue quiets down for the night and the hoot owls start in, I think about how much I always miss all this conversation during the silent nights of deep winter. Happy birds are back, a truly hopeful sign that we are passing into spring, and something soon will happen…
Barnstorming 