Can you relate to Spring, or do you live someplace nice?
I've again reached the age where I don't have to worry about speaking the Truth without offending anyone. (FYI: Intellectual independence is first achieved at age 13, lost at 18, and retrieved again at 62).
So, let me tell you the Truth about Spring: When winter departs the season to follow is amazingly beautiful. Warm, light-filled, flower-draped, and decked in pale green leaves. It is a salad bar with garnishing, a sunny day after the storm, a fluffy lamb romping-bounding across the meadow like they did in the Warner Brothers cartoons of my youth. (Yeah, the little woolly buggers actually go boing-boing-boing, stiff-legged bouncing. It's disgustingly cute.) Spring is crocuses and tulips and daffodils and tiny leaves that halo the trees in green mist. It is dogwoods and cherry blossoms and warm breezes stirring the wind-chimes. It is walking through the park in a short-sleeved shirt. Robins, Cardinals, yellow finches, and hummingbirds.
The only response to such natural unfoldment is a powerful, plaintive cry raised to the March kite-breezes, outgoing lions and incoming lambs: Spring sucks!
Well, not Spring itself, actually. But what we have to endure to get there...THAT is the rub.
Remember scraping windshield ice while your tailpipe smokes like a crack addict? Remember when you waddled across the snowpack like a penguin and hoped you wouldn't end up a frozen turtle on its back? Remember the brrr-cold wind howling at your exposed ears and the ankle-deep slush in the Wal-Mart parking lot?
Now, don't get me wrong. I actually love winter, or some aspects of it. New snow brightens up the world and makes everything look...well, clean. There's nothing as joyful as sitting by the fire while a blizzard howls outside, provided you don't have to drive out into the white tornado and pick up a stranded family member or get some forgotten essential ingredient for the winter feast in process in your kitchen. And there are those who enjoy winter sports, too, although I am certain these people are quite mad, or at least go temporarily insane when the ski slopes beckon.
But Spring is only a big deal because nature has deprived us for at least four or five months. And every Spring I ask myself, "Why don’t you move someplace where winter means different flowers in bloom?" And every summer I forget there is such a thing as winter. And then the autumn arrives in full color, and I actually begin to look forward to cold days and white flakes.
And then January, and I remember again...Oh, yeah. That's why Spring is such a big deal.
There is probably a great sermon outline somewhere in the whining paragraphs above, buried in the snowdrifts or hiding among clusters of new leaves. But it's Monday, late March, and it's cold again in Missouri, and I can't, for the life of me, think of anything profound or theological or metaphysical. So, I'll just sit here and affirm One Presence/One Power, and pray to Thor the Norse god of Storms to get this winter over so I can go sit in Myrtle's grove again.
Spring reminds us about those good things we have been missing, while holding out the prospect of a better world to come. Maybe that's what all religions are supposed to do...but I reiterate...it sucketh. Let's get on with summer.
Hmm...let me recall...wasn't last July really too hot and humid?
RevTom
The only response to such natural unfoldment is a powerful, plaintive cry raised to the March kite-breezes, outgoing lions and incoming lambs: Spring sucks!
Well, not Spring itself, actually. But what we have to endure to get there...THAT is the rub.
Remember scraping windshield ice while your tailpipe smokes like a crack addict? Remember when you waddled across the snowpack like a penguin and hoped you wouldn't end up a frozen turtle on its back? Remember the brrr-cold wind howling at your exposed ears and the ankle-deep slush in the Wal-Mart parking lot?
Now, don't get me wrong. I actually love winter, or some aspects of it. New snow brightens up the world and makes everything look...well, clean. There's nothing as joyful as sitting by the fire while a blizzard howls outside, provided you don't have to drive out into the white tornado and pick up a stranded family member or get some forgotten essential ingredient for the winter feast in process in your kitchen. And there are those who enjoy winter sports, too, although I am certain these people are quite mad, or at least go temporarily insane when the ski slopes beckon.
But Spring is only a big deal because nature has deprived us for at least four or five months. And every Spring I ask myself, "Why don’t you move someplace where winter means different flowers in bloom?" And every summer I forget there is such a thing as winter. And then the autumn arrives in full color, and I actually begin to look forward to cold days and white flakes.
And then January, and I remember again...Oh, yeah. That's why Spring is such a big deal.
There is probably a great sermon outline somewhere in the whining paragraphs above, buried in the snowdrifts or hiding among clusters of new leaves. But it's Monday, late March, and it's cold again in Missouri, and I can't, for the life of me, think of anything profound or theological or metaphysical. So, I'll just sit here and affirm One Presence/One Power, and pray to Thor the Norse god of Storms to get this winter over so I can go sit in Myrtle's grove again.
Spring reminds us about those good things we have been missing, while holding out the prospect of a better world to come. Maybe that's what all religions are supposed to do...but I reiterate...it sucketh. Let's get on with summer.
Hmm...let me recall...wasn't last July really too hot and humid?
RevTom
1 comment:
OK now I know where to find you when your not in your office, Myrtle Fillmore Grove!Hey where's your photo on your page, you are usually staring back at us.
Blessings,
F
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