Monday Morning Musing: One Day More

Tomorrow is the Equinox and spring arrives and we exhale a little more readily because with it comes the promise of new-ness. New life and new birth and new growth and new days and new ness. If fall and winter are the unique comfort of same-ness, of cozy nights and fires in the fireplace, and early dark, then spring sits at the opposite end of the table.

We've had a short run of beautiful spring like days this weekend and people have come out of their homes to revel in it all.

One of my very favorite authors is Margaret Renkl. She is a southerner, originally from Alabama and now living in Tennessee. She connects deeply in her writing to the land and the people and the animals and birds. Her latest tome is The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, which reads like a literary devotional - one essay for each week, keeping time with the seasonal calendar. I read them on Sunday nights, before sleep, as a way to greet a new week when I wake.

Here's what she wrote for the first week of Spring:

The Season of Waking

Spring * Week One

The world does not proceed according to our plans. The world is an old dog, following us around the kitchen with its eyes. The world understands us. We understand nothing, control less.

Today it is springtime. Every green thing has grown greener as the pines send out new growth. Every brown thing is taking on green as the hardwoods wake into warmth. But tonight the black sky is spitting out ice, and the green sap rising will likewise turn to ice in the dark. Some of these frail green things will be blasted forever, but most will live. Life is what life does.

We, too, will live. In the morning we will wake and rejoice, for we are once more among the living.

(The illustrations in this book are gorgeous, too, and done by Renkl's brother, Billy Renkl).