This day has dawned in a wash of brilliant amber light, an eastern sky filled with shades of silver and gold, peach and rose — all the shades of a fire lily, petals opening across the sky.
It’s a world in full flower now, even if the only petals open on the ground yet are those of the humble dandelion.
Eleven small yellow birds have flocked to the feeder, a mix of goldfinches and pine siskins. I would say the former are early, except that they wintered with us, entirely out of season; they arrived in the fall and simply never left. The latter are out of season, too; these have been, at least in recent decades, the small birds of summer’s end, the tiny trapeze artists who hang from the dried wild sunflowers as autumn takes hold.
And yet, they like our yellow-headed blackbird friend who prefers the company of the chickens beneath the red willows, are here all the same.
We wonder whether the wild creatures saw this coming: felt, if not otherwise understood, that a pandemic was here, even if we humans were (and remain) too stubborn to acknowledge the reality of it. Perhaps these are a return to older patterns, outside the memory, or at least the notice, of those alive now. Perhaps they are an evolutionary adaptation, observable in real time, as the changes in climate alter their rhythms in ways imperceptible to human senses.
Perhaps they are both. This world has been here before, after all, even if humanity is arrogant enough to think otherwise.
Pandemic isolation provides us with, in this era, a unique opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with our Mother Earth: to learn the rhythm of her breathing and the beat of her heart, to be reintroduced to her children and to learn the cycles and patterns of the birth and growth and life.
And it reminds us, too, to relearn courage of heart and strength of spirit. Consider, for a moment, the bravery it must take for the year’s first flower to open, to be confident enough, to have sufficient faith, that one can withstand the wind and the weather and the cold of the darkest hours to survive in one’s finest, most fragile garb — more, that one can live to flower and fruit and leave a legacy of immortality behind at season’s end.
Perhaps that should be our concern now, too — less about showing off the beauty of our material garb to the public in hopes of impressing others than about making ourselves vulnerable in the service of sustaining future generations.
Let this be a time of unfolding petals, of lifting the brilliant shades of our skills and talents to creating a better world for our children yet unborn.
~ Aji
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