Gift of Spring: This capacity to trust in life's renewal. Spring brings reassurance, perhaps most powerfully, through the defining integrity of the ephemeral. Like when our being thrills with the beauty shown in the litter of spent blooms, when we realize the rebirth that’s carried in pollen dust, carried home in spring’s spiraling winds, the spring-cast seeding soon enough to be washed into our mother earth. Throughout this, this full cycle, we all are held—if we but believe it—by our eternal home, the One.
This unique transcendent snowflake ever kissing, dissolving, transforming on the porous covering of heartbeat.
The “eternal-now” flows in this and every manifestation. It’s especially poignant in light’s fleeting snapshot: this Beauty. Each instance names the Name, variously called by all incarnations of Presence: Nature, Peace, Joy…the one Love, of Whom we all belong.
It’s in this, in each instance, in the unique transcendent spring-snowflake ever kissing, dissolving, transforming on the porous covering of heartbeat.
The ever-changing appearance of form, the almost illusion of any separation from the Creator, in the resonant “Be!” the Real that’s present in every particle of breath, in every sign throughout creation. This.
This: The curious inhabiting of transient place, limitless space, ambivalent time, inarticulable knowing, the indwelling simultaneously moving here/there.
Gleaning from recent readings:
In his chapter on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, James Olney hints at opportunity in the potentially disconcerting ephemerality of spring with its push toward the Source that gives the ultimate order:
“…experience per se, at least so far as humans are concerned, until given formal ordering and completion in the art work, until given the satisfaction of a new life in structural design, is void of meaning; and that design or pattern is the thing which, relating part to part and part to whole and implying an end in the beginning and middle, demonstrates significance in otherwise meaningless experience. But pattern is not discovered by us—mere details and parts, after all, of the whole design of life—-within experience. Instead we, insofar as we are artists, create the pattern and impose it on experience. Art formalizes experience; form implies an end and an intention, and so a meaning…” (Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography, p. 270)
Richard Rohr in Hope Against Darkness offers a text of Spring, pointing to its wild exuberance:
“The word enthusiasm (en-theos in Greek) means ‘filled with God.’ I’m not encouraging mindless enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm that is based on intelligence and wisdom and that great gift of hope. Hope is a participation in the very life of God. This hope has nothing to do with circumstances or things going well. It can even thrive in adversity and trial. True faith, which always includes hope and love—is a predisposition to yes.” p. 52
From the concluding lines of al-Baqarah, a foundation for unity, for hope even in the disintegrating swirl of diverse blossoms that appear so fragile, that seem to be fading, losing the effervescence:
“The Messenger believes in what was sent down to him from his Lord, as do the believers. Each believes in God, His angels, His Books, and His messengers. ‘We make no distinction between any of His messengers.’ And they say, ‘We hear and obey. Thy forgiveness, our Lord! And unto Thee is the journey’s end.’ God tasks no soul beyond its capacity. . .” (The Study Qur’an, Trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Caner K. Dagli, Maria Massi Dakake, Joseph E.B. Lumbard, and Mohammed Rustom; 2: 235-236; pp. 124-125)
