Spring this year is a hesitant thing, flighty and anxious, like the bluebirds that have arrived to make their home here so thoroughly out of season.
The grass is now mostly lush and green — in some corners, already in need of cutting. The mercury no longer plunges to single digits at night, although it descends well below the freezing mark with regularity. During the daylight hours, however, the temperatures are as inconsistent as the skies, swinging wildly between sunny warmth and the cold damp air that comes with sleet and snow.
And then there are the trees.
The tree pollen count is high — so high that I spend half my days hoarse and congested, eyes watering. One would think I had the flue, or something worse, but it’s nothing more than seasonal allergies. Spring’s own hesitancy notwithstanding, the allergies have arrived right on time and in full force.
Which is odd, that. Because only one of our many aspens can properly be said to be leafing out. All the others, tardy souls, remain in the catkin stage, each velvety bud still opening like an arboreal chrysalis. After all these weeks of metamorphosis, of the trees shedding their pollen, we might reasonably have expected to see a little more green by the beginning of May. Instead, we see monsoonal patterns moved up to bring snow instead of rain, and a lengthened period of pollination.
The aspens are strange spirits as it is: tall bone-white skeletal beings, possessed of more arms than the entire pantheon of deities of our cousins of similar name and vastly different traditions half a world away. They own many more eyes, as well, bearing faces that are also bodies, their trunks dotted with wide-open orbs to rival any Third Eye in size and visionary reach. Their fundamental form is obscured in the warmer months, by summer’s rich green robes and autumn’s red-gold shawls of fire, but now, in this small space before the leaves birth themselves anew, we can still see their essential selves.
And it is in this season that they draw our eyes skyward, reminding us to look up from the frenzied adherence to our regimented days. This year, those skies at this season are unusually varied, cloud-tossed and storm-ridden and still behind it all that clear vaulted blue of a turquoise jewel as seen from within its domed surface. It’s a bit like looking through a sacred kaleidoscope, the world reduced to a spiraling geometry within the circle’s embrace, a Spirit’s-Eye view from the ground up.
And so, for this day that has dawned leaden and gray, Father Sun hiding behind a dense veil of fog, I will remind myself throughout the coming hours to look up, through the skyward-reaching arms of the aspens, to embrace the world as they do, as it is, in all its ever-changing kaleidoscopic beauty.
~ Aji
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