Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Spring!

                          RETURN

the lilac bush   the redbud tree   they're back
so am I it seems    blooming one more spring

each time around gets harder    yet freer too
the differences between     smaller     smaller

a spring will come I won't be here     walking
talking    still hungry for a breath       a touch

find me then in the purest explosions of joy
buds    every size   shape   color   blossoming

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 FIND ME IN THE PUREST EXPLOSIONS OF JOY

     My bones are pierced by winter but my heart's always waiting for spring. When I first hear the mourning dove's cry, first see the raw green tip of the crocus spearing above ground, a pang of joy shivers through me. Leaden ice, after thickening and hardening inside for months, at last begins to thaw. I'm an inseparable part of this awakening; an unquenchable rebirth unfurls from the innermost core!

     Yet what a bruising resurrection--this dying animal already feels the famished gravity of a terminal winter it will not survive. I am, after all, just an animated skeleton in fancy dress. On some future PBS Special, that could be my skull the archaeologist holds up to the camera, pointing out an intriguing pattern of telltale cracks. This is the inescapable human condition: I'm born to die, as sure as the sun goes down each day; and yet, even while pondering my own mortality, I become aware of something infinite within me which brooks no intercourse with death.

     Such awareness is not a matter of theory, or even faith. It's an experience, a knowing, an existential Reality. Once we attain it, we don't need anything else to beacon our being's Omega Point. Lose it, and nothing in this whole, extravagant universe can take its place. Here's the tragic affliction of a secular age. We've chucked away a priceless Diamond, a scintillating diadem of consciousness, and in its place erected ten thousand glittering idols compacted from ashes and dust.

     Spring not only releases my senses from constricting cold and ice; it liberates my spirit from the illusion that the essence of who and what I am must inevitably perish, just because my body does. Look! Look at those irrepressible new grass blades thrusting up, right through the ice and snow; and there--the first taut buds of the daffodil bursting open! Listen! Listen to the cardinal proclaiming his brash hullabaloo from the highest branch! How can I deny a resounding response from my own primal depths? Here's the bedrock bottom line. Winter dying? It's only the indispensable womb of spring.

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2 comments:

  1. Beautiful words, beautiful art. Thanks, Bob. I hope all is well with you.

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  2. I miss living in a place that has a real spring. We just get little bump where I live.

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