Spring comes quickly: overnight the plum tree blossoms, the warm air fills with bird calls.
In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of the sun with rays coming out all around but because the background is dirt, the sun is black. There is no signature.
Alas, very soon everything will disappear: the bird calls, the delicate blossoms. In the end, even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into oblivion.
Nevertheless, the artist intends a mood of celebration.
How beautiful the blossoms are — emblems of the resilience of life. The birds approach eagerly. ~Louise Glück “Primavera”
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing; The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy, Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning, Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy, Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Spring”
And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true. ” Revelation 21:5
Given a choice, humanity chose sour over the sweetness we were created for ~ giving up walks together in the cool of the day to feed an appetite that could never be sated.
God made a choice to bring us back with His own blood as if we are worthy of Him.
He says we are. He dies to prove it.
Every day I choose to believe earth can be sweet and beautiful again. Each spring becomes a celebration of our resilience.
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It’s so easy to look and see what we pass through in this world, but we don’t. If you’re like me, you see so little. You see what you expect to see rather than what’s there. ~Frederick Buechner from The Remarkable Ordinary
Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. John 21:12
It is too easy, by the next day, to let go of Easter — to slide back into the Monday routine, managing our best to get through each day, our jaws set, our teeth gritted, as we have before.
We are blinded by our grief, shivering in misery, thinking Him only the Gardener as He passed by. We don’t pay attention to Who is right before us, Who is always tending us: the new Adam, caring for a world desperate for rescue.
God knows this about us. So He invites us to breakfast on Monday and every day thereafter.
He feeds us, a tangible and meaningful act of nourishing us in our most basic human needs though we’ve done nothing to deserve the gift. He cooks up fish on a beach at dawn and welcomes us to join Him, as if nothing extraordinary has just happened.
Just yesterday evening he reviewed His Word and broke bread in Emmaus, opening the eyes and hearts of those like us who failed to see Who this is walking beside them.
This is no ordinary Gardener.
When He offers up a meal of His Word, the gift is nothing less than Himself.
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I know a bleeding-heart plant that has thrived for sixty years if not more, and has never missed a spring without rising and spreading itself into a glossy bush, with many small red hearts dangling. Don’t you think that deserves a little thought? The woman who planted it has been gone for a long time, and everyone who saw it in that time has also died or moved away and so, like so many stories, this one can’t get finished properly. Most things that are important, have you noticed, lack a certain neatness. More delicious, anyway, is to remember my grandmother’s pleasure when the dissolve of winter was over and the green knobs appeared and began to rise, and to cre- ate their many hearts. One would say she was a simple woman, made happy by simple things. I think this was true. And more than once, in my long life, I have wished to be her. ~Mary Oliver “The Bleeding-Heart”from New and Selected Poems Volume Two
My Grandma Kittie grew flowers–lots of them. Her garden stretched along both sides of the sidewalk to her old two story farm house, in window boxes and beds around the perimeter, in little islands scattered about the yard anchored by a tree, or a piece of driftwood, a gold fish pond or a large rock. Wisteria hung like a thick curtain of purple braids from the roof of her chicken coop, and her greenhouse, far bigger than her home, smelled moist and mossy with hanging fuschia baskets. For her it was full time joy disguised as a job: she sold seedlings, and ready-to-display baskets, and fresh flower arrangements.
She often said she was sure heaven would be full of flowers needing tending, and she was just practicing for the day when she could make herself useful as a gardener for God.
Visiting Grandma meant spending summer evenings in her yard heavy with wafting flower perfume. She especially loved her bleeding hearts bushes that returned every spring, dripping their red blossoms over her unruly lawn.
Another of her favorite flowers was the evening primrose. It was one of a few night blooming plants meant to attract pollinating moths. Its tall stems were adorned by lance shaped leaves, with multiple buds and blooms per stem. Each evening, and it was possible to set one’s watch by its punctuality, only one green wrapped bud per stem would open, revealing a bright yellow blossom with four delicate veined petals, a rosette of stamens and a cross-shaped stigma in the center, rising far above the blossom. The yellow was so vivid and lively, it seemed almost like a drop of sun had been left on earth to light the night. By morning, the bloom would begin to wither and wilt under the real sunlight, somehow overcome with the brightness, and would blush a pinkish orange as it folded upon itself, ready to die and drop from the plant in only a day or two, leaving a bulging seed pod behind.
I would settle down on the damp lawn at twilight, usually right before dusk fell, to watch the choreography of opening of blossoms on stem after stem of evening primrose. Whatever the trigger was for the process of unfolding, there would be a sudden loosening of the protective green calyces, in an almost audible release. Then over the course of about a minute, the overlapping yellow petals would unfurl, slowly, gently, purposefully, revealing their pollen treasure trove inside. It was like watching time lapse cinematography, only this was an accelerated, real time flourish of beauty, happening right before my eyes. I always felt privileged to witness each unveiling as Grandma liked to remind me that few flowers ever allowed us to behold both their birth and death. The evening primrose was not at all shy about sharing itself and it would enhance the show with a sweet lingering fragrance.
Grandma knew how much I enjoyed the evening primrose display, so she saved seeds from the seed pods for me, and helped me plant them at our house during one of her spring time visits. I remember scattering the seeds with her in a specially chosen spot, in anticipation of the “drops of sun” that would grace our yard come summertime. However, Grandma was more tired than usual on this particular visit, taking naps and not as eager to go for walks or eat the special meals cooked in honor of her visit. Her usually resonant laughing brown eyes appeared dull, almost muddy.
The day she was to return to her home, she came into the kitchen at breakfast time, wearily setting down her packed bags. She gave me a hug and I looked at her. Something was dreadfully wrong. Grandma’s eyes were turning yellow.
Instead of returning home that day, she went to the hospital. Within a day, she had surgery and within two days, was told she had terminal pancreatic cancer. She did not last long, her skin becoming more jaundiced by the day, her eyes more icteric and far away. She soon left her earthly gardens to cultivate those in heaven.
I’ve kept bleeding hearts and evening primrose in my garden ever since. Grandma’s heart dangles from the bushes and she is released from each primrose bloom as it unfolds precipitously in the evening. She wafts across the yard in its perfume. Her spirit, a drop of sun coming to rest, luminous, for a brief stay upon the earth, only to fall before we’re ready to let it go. But as the wilted bloom lets go, its seeds have already begun to form.
I’m sure Grandma is still growing flowers. And my soil-covered hands look more like hers every day.
The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever. Isaiah 40: 7-8
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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This morning’s sun is not the honey light of summer, thick with golden dust and slow as syrup pouring from a jug. It’s bright, but thin and cold, and slanted steep and low across the hillsides. Frost is blooming white, these flowers forced by icy winds that blow as hard this morning as they blew all night. Too cold for rain, but far too dry for snow.
And I am restless, pacing to and fro enduring winter’s grip that holds us tight. But my camellias, which somehow know what weather to expect—they’re always right— have broken bud. Now scarlet petals glow outside the window where I sit and write. ~Tiel Aisha Ansari “Camellias” from Dervish Lions
Near a shrine in Japan he’d swept the path and then placed camellia blossoms there.
Or — we had no way of knowing — he’d swept the path between fallen camellias. ~Carol Snow “Tour”
Camellia and crocus blossoms are hardy enough to withstand our current low temperatures, defying freezing winds and hard frosts with their resilience.
Inevitably, their petals eventually will begin to brown at the edges and wither.
On windy days, the full camellia blooms plop to the ground without warning, scattering about like a nubby floral throw rug. They are too bulky to step on, so the tendency is to pick a path around them, allowing them the dignity of a few more days before being swept off the sidewalks.
These fallen winter blossoms become almost sacred, gracing the paths the living still must navigate. They are indeed grounding for the passersby, a reminder that our time to let go will soon come too. As we restlessly pursue our days and measure our steps, we try to carefully make our way around their fading beauty.
As a reminder to us, there is an unexpected blessing bestowed in their budding, in their blooming, in their ebbing away.
Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble. They spring up like flowers and wither away; like fleeting shadows, they do not endure. Do you fix your eye on them? Job 14: 1-3
The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever. Isaiah 40:7-8
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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March. I am beginning to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost where the moles have nosed up their cold castings, and the ground cover in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice around foliage and stem night by night,
but as the light lengthens, preacher of good news, evangelizing leaves and branches, his large gestures beckon green out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting from the cotoneasters. A single bee finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow aconites glowing, low to the ground like little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up a purple hand here, there, as I stand on my doorstep, my own face drinking in heat and light like a bud welcoming resurrection, and my hand up, too, ready to sign on for conversion. ~Luci Shaw “Revival” from What the Light was Like
The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled Out in the sun, After frightful operation. She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun, To be healed, Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind, Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little. While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know She is not going to die. ~Ted Hughes from ” A March Morning Unlike Others” from Ted Hughes. Collected Poems
Spring is emerging slowly from this haggard and droopy winter. All growing things are still stuck in morning frost for another week at least. Then, like the old “Wizard of Oz” movie, the landscape will suddenly turn from monochrome to technicolor, the soundtrack from forlorn to glorious birdsong.
Yearning for spring to commence, I tap my foot impatiently as if owed a timely seasonal transformation from dormant to verdant. We all have been waiting for the Physician’s announcement that this patient survived some intricate life-changing procedure: “I’m happy to say the Earth is alive after all, now revived and restored, wounded but healing, breathing on her own but too sedated for a visit just yet.”
I wait impatiently to celebrate her return to health, knowing this temporary home of ours is still very much alive. She breathes, she thrives, blooming and singing with everything she’s got. And so will I.
He sends his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly. 16 He spreads the snow like wool and scatters the frost like ashes. 17 He hurls down his hail like pebbles. Who can withstand his icy blast? 18 He sends his word and melts them; he stirs up his breezes, and the waters flow. Psalm 147: 15-18
This Lenten season I reflect on the words of the 19th century southern spiritual hymn “What Wondrous Love is This”
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I saw that a yellow crocus bud had pierced a dead oak leaf, then opened wide. How strong its appetite for the luxury of the sun! ~Jane Kenyon from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems
Beyond my window in the night Is but a drab inglorious street, Yet there the frost and clean starlight As over Warwick woods are sweet.
Under the grey drift of the town The crocus works among the mould As eagerly as those that crown The Warwick spring in flame and gold.
And when the tramway down the hill Across the cobbles moans and rings, There is about my window-sill The tumult of a thousand wings. ~John Drinkwater “A Town Window”
This is why I believe that God really has dived down into the bottom of creation, and has come up bringing the whole redeemed nature on His shoulders. The miracles that have already happened are, of course, as Scripture so often says, the first fruits of that cosmic summer which is presently coming on.
Christ has risen, and so we shall rise.
…To be sure, it feels wintry enough still: but often in the very early spring it feels like that. Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. A man really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’ in the same spirit in which he says ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’
Because we know what is coming behind the crocus.
The spring comes slowly down the way, but the great thing is that the corner has been turned. There is, of course, this difference that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not.
We can.
We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on…to which He is calling us.
It remains with us whether to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer. ~C. S. Lewis from “God in the Dock”
Our appetite is strong for light and warmth, leaving winter behind. Our desire is to defeat death, piercing through the decay and flourishing among the living, opening wide our faces to the luxury of luminous grace freely given.
We have turned the corner and have the power to choose Light. We need only follow the pathway out of darkness. We need only follow the Son as he leads the way.
The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. Isaiah 35: 1-2
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Mid-January and still the last amaryllis refuses. Planted in October, it just now raises a green bud tip to the bright window. Inside the plain package waits a blaring red, the flower furled, held like breath in the trumpeter’s body. ~Francesca Bell “Late Blooming” from What Small Sound
Sometimes when you’re in a dark place you think you’ve been buried, but actually you’ve been planted. ~Christine Caine
It came home with me over a month ago, a non-descript bulb with a green sword-blade shoot emerging shyly from the top.
Its care and feeding was a lot of “watch and wait” and just a little water. It has been our winter morning entertainment as we munched down cereal, gauging how many centimeters it rose over night.
It took over the kitchen table~ two tall stalks topped with tight-fisted buds which opened oh-so-slowly over several days like a drowsy student after Christmas break, not yet ready to meet and greet the world but once the commitment to wake is made, there is no other blossoming quite like it anywhere.
How can we possibly understand, while still buried in the dark, that we too rest planted in holy ground, waiting for the wakening that calls us forth to bloom, and fruit, and amaze.
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I let her garden go. let it go, let it go How can I watch the hummingbird Hover to sip With its beak’s tip The purple bee balm—whirring as we heard It years ago? The weeds rise rank and thick let it go, let it go Where annuals grew and burdock grows, Where standing she At once could see The peony, the lily, and the rose Rise over brick She’d laid in patterns. Moss let it go, let it go Turns the bricks green, softening them By the gray rocks Where hollyhocks That lofted while she lived, stem by tall stem, Blossom with loss. ~Donald Hall, “Her Garden” from White Apples and the Taste of Stone
As fall now brings gray mornings heavy with clouds and tear-streaked windows, I pause, melancholy at the passage of time.
Whether to grieve over another hour passed another breath exhaled another broken heart beat
Or to climb my way out of deepless dolor by starting the work of planting next spring’s garden
It takes sweat and dirty hands and yes, tears from heaven to make it flourish, but even so – just maybe – my memories so carefully planted like seeds might blossom fully from the soil of loss.
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Was it worthwhile to paint so fair The every leaf – to vein with faultless art Each petal, taking the boon light and air Of summer so to heart?
To bring thy beauty unto a perfect flower, Then like a passing fragrance or a smile Vanish away, beyond recovery’s power – Was it, frail bloom, worthwhile?
Thy silence answers: “Life was mine! And I, who pass without regret or grief, Have cared the more to make my moment fine, Because it was so brief.
In its first radiance I have seen The sun! – Why tarry then till comes the night? I go my way, content that I have been Part of the morning light!” ~Florence Earle Coates “The Morning Glory”
Can I too unfurl with joy in the morning light, knowing I will wilt and wither at the end of the day? Will I live fully open to this day, unconcerned about tomorrow?
God intended for us to tend His garden yet He continually tends us, His frail blooms. We mess up like random useless weeds and are given a daily opportunity to make it right. I am alive – no question in my mind – to try to make this day better for others.
I blossom under His tending and like a passing smile, I will leave without grief or regret.
Walking, I drew my hand over the lumpy bloom of a spray of purple; I stripped away my fingers, stained purple; put it to my nose,
the minty honey, a perfume so aggressively pleasant—I gave it to you to smell, my daughter, and you pulled away as if
I was giving you a palm full of wasps, deceptions: “Smell the way the air changes because of purple and green.”
This is the promise I make to you: I will never give you a fist full of wasps, just the surprise of purple and the scent of rain. ~Kwame Dawes “Purple”
But maybe I ought to practise a little now? So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple. ~Jenny Joseph from “Warning”
I own no purple clothing or accessories to wear – never have. It’s not that I don’t like purple – I do. I just have never felt worthy to be adorned in it like the sky and flowers and fruit.
Perhaps my reluctance to wear purple is that it represents the rich and royal … yet also the bruised and battered … all at once. I know One who was both and took a beating for me, in my place.
A surprise in His gift of purple to us all.
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