Carpe Diem

Today was the first short-sleeved-weather day of the season. It was summer come early: all bright sunshine and warm air and flowers. The forsythia’s yellow shoots are lining the streets and roads; maples are beginning to flower; the magnolias and weeping cherry trees are in full bloom. It was too nice to stay inside.

I opened the windows and the smell of fresh air came into the house. It was the smell of my childhood summer mornings, of clean sheets that had been dried outdoors in the sun all day. It was the smell of vacation. It reminded me of the summer days a decade ago, when I used to take a blanket out back and lie on the lawn writing verses. I used to share them with a friend; we called them “blanket poetry.”

Everything about the day seemed to beg me to go outside, have fun, celebrate the fine weather. But I had papers to grade. So I sat at my desk and tried to read them and make plans for next week’s classes. I fidgeted and daydreamed, as distracted as my most bored student. I watched the clock and checked my email and added a couple of paragraphs to my novel. I tried to convince myself that English composition was important and that transitional sentences really mattered.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and in the middle of the afternoon I took the dog out. I tossed the ball for her until she got tired and lay down by the lawn chair. I walked around the yard. The area under the maple trees was blanketed with yellow dog-tooth violets; a row of bright double-daffodils lined the fence between our neighbor’s house and ours. The grass was greening up, encouraged by last week’s rain. The insects were out, too. Tiny black gnats danced in clouds. I watched a bumble bee couple copulate in the air. A small white butterfly fluttered among the budding bluebells. A garter snake slid beneath a thicket of raspberry shoots and smoothly disappeared.

I sat down on the chair and did nothing, thought nothing, for awhile. The sun lay like a friendly arm across my shoulders. I looked at maple seedlings coming up on the lawn, scattered among the few remaining blossoms of Siberian squill. I reached down and stroked my dog’s black and brown side.

It occurred to me that for the first time that day I was doing exactly what I should be doing. I felt centered, still, that my heart was full and satisfied.

The ancient Greeks talked about kairos ­– the ripe time, the opportune moment. It’s akin to knowing when fruit is ripe and ready to be picked. I am slowly learning to fine-tune my awareness of time, so that I can detect its ripeness, its fullness. And so that its ripeness will be reflected in me.

Gray Days

When we talk about spring we usually focus on flowers and sun-warmed breezes. We tend to forget the gray days. Days like yesterday when the sky was the color of aluminum and the wind had an icy edge to it. Days like today when the clouds are low and it’s drizzling rain and there’s a general gloom outdoors. Even my neighbor’s hedge of forsythia seems to have a dreary cast this morning. The weather forecast calls for thunderstorms and perhaps the falling barometric pressure is partly responsible for my gray mood.

Sometimes gray days are just days we have to get through. It’s best to settle down and ride them out. But sometimes they can offer us new and unexpected perspectives. The rain nourishes and charges the soil with nutrients for fledgling plants. Thunderstorms remind us that we’re vulnerable to forces beyond our control. Life is not sustained by sunshine alone.

This time of year our back yard is graced by a forsythia bush. It’s overgrown and unpruned and some might call it unsightly, but I like the graceful disorder of its branches. Sunday afternoon I stood awhile and watched the wind blow through the forsythia. The long shoots bent and rose in a kind of supple dance. The blossoms shook, but did not collapse; they did not let go. Though I’m fond of taking still pictures with my camera, I was reminded that nothing is static, nothing is still, least of all life. There are sunny days and windy days and gray days and we can bear them all. If our spirits are supple enough to dance.

Another Woman's Garden

Another woman’s garden grows in mine:
here her daffodils, my bluebells, her white columbine,
my narcissus jumbled with her trillium,
her trout lilies confusing my rosarium.
Though I would not know this woman by her face,
my garden gives her vision honored space.
Each spring my order’s changed by her intent,
sure sign hegemony is not what nature meant.

Grace

Last night, out of the blue, I received a phone call from the daughter of my best friend who died in a traffic accident a year and a half ago. Because my friend and I lived on opposite coasts, we exchanged pictures but rarely saw each other’s children. So even though her daughter is my daughter’s age and they attended the same college, I really didn’t know her or her younger brother. But now here she was, smack in the middle of an April evening, telling me her plans and her brother’s whereabouts, as openly as if we’d talked many times before. Though we touched briefly on how hard it is to cope with the sudden death of someone we love, we talked more about the present and the future than the past. We promised to keep in touch.

After I hung up, I thought about our conversation. I thought about how unexpectedly this young woman had come into my life on an otherwise ordinary day. I thought about how my maternal feelings had kicked in when I talked with her, how similar our conversation was to phone conversations with my own adult children. I thought about how her speech cadences had reminded me of her mother’s. I thought about how I felt blessed in the same way I used to when I got off the phone with her mother. It wasn’t the same as talking with her mother, but it was the next best thing. It was grounding. It was healing. It was a gift.

The siberian squill have come out now and they are everywhere, carpeting the woods, creeping out onto lawns, creating a vast blue carpet the same deep hue as the April sky. Although I've lived here long enough to expect them, every spring when they emerge I'm astonished again by their beauty. I suppose a scientist would say that the squill have their own reasons for covering my woods and lawn in such glorious color, and no doubt that's true. But I think they're also a sign of God's surprising extravagance, otherwise known as grace.

In spring it seems especially easy to perceive these signs of grace in our lives. But grace comes in all seasons, and assumes many guises. What's characteristic is that grace always surprises us. It reminds us that life is a mystery. Encountering grace leaves us knowing that, in some small way, we have been made whole again. We know for certain we have been blessed.

Easter Mysteries

Last Thursday night at our church’s tenebrae service I sang sorrowing hymns with the congregation and choir, hymns that commemorate the suffering and death of Jesus. On Sunday morning I sang with them the joyful Easter hymns of resurrection. I’ve been singing these hymns for so many years that I know all their verses by heart. The danger with knowing a song by heart, of course, is that the words can get lost in the music. And the same is true of the Easter story: familiarity can swallow meaning.

I have heard this story every year for as long as I can remember. I know it so well I no longer appreciate its shock value. I say that Jesus was crucified, died and buried and on the third day was raised from the dead but forget that it’s a declaration that makes no sense. By all rational measures, it’s absurd, (as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians.)

Added to that, the risen Christ is a very mysterious figure. The gospels are clear about only one thing: that He rose from the dead. After that, the story gets pretty hazy. People don’t seem to recognize Jesus at first. He appears unexpectedly and vanishes without warning. Even his friends, who you’d think would know him the instant they saw him, have no idea who he is. They believe he’s a stranger until they’re cued in by his voice or his actions.

The truth is I don’t fully understand what we celebrate at Easter. I rejoice in a faith that is, by its very nature, beyond understanding. I sing the glorious, triumphant hymns. I recite the familiar liturgy: Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! without being stunned.

But I should be stunned. I should be reeling in my pew. The hair on the back of my neck should be standing up straight. I should feel as if the world has been picked up and shaken. I should feel as if my life has turned inside out.

Because it has.

April Birthdays

Recently it occurred to me that several of my friends have April birthdays. I don’t know if this curiosity is in any way significant, but I’ve spent some time pondering it in the last few days. April is a transformational month here in New England, so perhaps it’s noteworthy that most (though not all) of these friends were born here. It seems like a pretty good time of year to have a baby, since the chilly temperatures and starkly barren earth will soon give way to warmth and flowers. Birthdays, after all, celebrate life. And a friend’s birthday celebrates a particular life, one that has shaped and marked ours in important ways. If life is a tapestry, then our friends are surely its brightest threads.

In the last few years, two of my friends with April birthdays have died, both victims of traffic accidents. One of them was my lifelong college best friend. Her passing has left a ragged tear in my life that cannot be mended. The happiness I felt when her birthday rolled around each April – a day which I celebrated with her for over forty years – though too often from afar – is now sorrow-stained. Yet I still celebrate it, for her death has not diminished the impact of her life on mine.

I suspect that the commemoration of a birthday is a celebration not primarily of our own life but of our connection to the lives of others. Our celebration is actually less about our own individuality than about the “ties that bind.” We celebrate not the thread, but the tapestry.

Close Up

Today the landscape looks raw, scraped gray by the rigors of winter. Shoulder-high piles of branches lie by the roadside, remnant fences of last winter’s big ice storm. On my drive to work, I pass forests shorn by that ice; broken trees poke jagged shafts toward the sky but they look hostile and menacing, like the trees in a horror movie. Winter litter still lies along the roadside: errant plastic bags, beer cans, mashed cardboard boxes, the mysteriously shredded tires of eighteen-wheelers.

But it is spring, and the daffodils are up. They're unassuming little splashes of color, except where some imaginative gardener has massed them in large patches or spread them in wide ribbons along a walkway . Mostly they nod and bob alone in the cold gusts of wind, take lonely bows under the hard rain.

Close up, though, each daffodil is a golden world, a buttery promise of warmth to come. Sunshine in a cup.

Bad Days

I’ve had two bad days in a row. Not dreadful days; not terrifying days. Just days when things don’t go well, when I felt a bit like a car that’s not running on all cylinders. Over the years I’ve learned to be cautious on such days. I try not to make important decisions. I try not to compensate for my off-kilter feelings by pushing myself harder. I try to remember that I’ve had bad days before and they don’t last forever. I listen to music: the Bach Cell Suites and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and my son’s piano improvisations. I sing hymns: Amazing Grace, Softly and Tenderly, and Precious Lord. Music always helps.

Bad days are like thunderstorms. They diminish the light; they threaten; they stir us to seek shelter. Sometimes they startle us with sudden flashes of light; sometimes they shake the ground beneath our feet. Sometimes they drench us. But, like thunderstorms, they pass. The dark clouds roll away and the sun shines again.

This morning it’s foggy again and it’s raining. I had bad dreams last night. There are thunderstorms in the weather forecast. But right now there are robins all over our lawn, singing their spring hymns.

April

This morning the world is etched in shades of gray and white. A cold fog drifts along the ground, muting the colors. The lawns are brown; in the woods old leaves mat the ground.

The snowdrops are still in bloom, unobtrusive, close to the ground, as if they’re still half-snow. They’re hard to see from a distance, though they’ve spread themselves in fat clumps under the bigger trees out back, and I can spot them from my study window if I know where to look.

Siberian squill have popped up all over the back yard, but they haven’t unfurled, so they don’t yet look like a blue carpet. The crocuses have bloomed and folded and have now collapsed under yesterday’s rain. They lie flat, pressed to the ground.

This Sunday is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. In church we’ll sing hymns and wave palm leaves and ponder the mysteries of life and death. We’ll think about joy in the face of suffering and sacrifice. We’ll talk with each other at coffee hour after the worship service. It’s our own kind of clumping together and showing ourselves, a bit like the snowdrops.

Yesterday I saw daffodils in bloom.