Today is that quadrennial gift of the cosmos: an extra day in the still-shortest month of the year.
To the world outside our small space here, it is a time swamped by punditry and politics, filled with a suffocating miasma of hot air and opportunistic anger. Here, it’s an extra day of work, a supremely ordinary day, yet one that feels like a threshold of sorts.
Perhaps it’s less a threshold to be crossed than a river, one now running high and hard and fast, as our world here flows together into an in-between season of winterspring, one that fits neatly into neither category but rather draws from both to create an unsettled and anticipatory air.
The mercury is now rising regularly to sixty, yet the air remains mostly cold and sharp, a product of the spring winds arriving, like the warmth, too early. Rain in the form of small showers is forecast for this afternoon, a welcome respite for the now rapidly-drying earth, but the forecast ten days out predicts several days of snow yet to come.
For this additional day that we have been given, though, the snow is scant even on the peaks, the rivers and streams having long since thawed and begun their rapid downward rush, like the foaming furious blue waters of the Quartzite dancing downriver amidst silver-green sage. The fields are already sprouting their own bright green blades, and our skies begin the day wrapped in bright blues, despite donning smoke-colored blankets of clouds by afternoon.
It is a season, a mid-season, and in-between season that brings it all: sun, storm; warmth, chill; light, dark. These are moody days, their spirits changing in an instant on the whims of the winds, and it does no good to wish for what is not.
This is a time that teaches patience, forbearance, adaptability, growth. It is a time when the natural world begins readying the land, in an endless cycle of freeze and thaw, rendering it fallow and ready to accept the seeds to be planted once the warmth decides to make its scattered visits a more permanent residency for the year. Now, there is no progress to be seen: The land still lies bare and mostly brown, without even the smallest of preparatory steps in evidence.
They are there, nonetheless.
We take the world’s daily revolution for granted, even though we cannot see it — only the result of it, manifest in the shifting positions of sun, moon, and stars, in the altered angles of light and shadow. So, too, does the world’s evolution occur, a constant slow and steady process of birth and rebirth, growth and regrowth, of dormancy midwifed into renewal until the times comes for sleep again.
It’s a lesson for us, as we walk the path of our days, when our progress seems slow or nonexistent, when our goals are stymied and forward movement hobbled. Spring is such a time, with its unsettled feeling and anticipatory air of waiting, waiting . . . for the winds to cease, for the sun to warm the land, for the planting season, for something, anything but what feels like a kind of stasis without form or identity that still refuses neutrality in favor of discomfort.
At a time like this, we can hang onto that which we can see, however fleetingly: the slow lengthening of the light, the sharp contrasts in the winds, the rushing of the water, the slowly growing presence of blues and greens in a landscape no longer only gray and brown.
On this gift of a day, an bonus the inverse accords us for only a quarter of time, it’s the lesson of adaptability: of reaching an accommodation with that which is unsettled and unsettling, of learning to appreciate its own discomfiting beauty . . . of learning, like the rest of the world is learning anew, how to grow.
~ Aji
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