Sometimes, the spirits of spring don’t show themselves. We know of their presence only by the imprints they leave upon our world: an auditory imprint, birdsong from a distance, the singer out of sight; a physical one, avian snow angels leaving feathery impressions on an accumulation of late-falling flakes.
We take such signs as evidence of their existence, don’t even really attribute it to any kind of faith. Our experience of our world tells us that where such signs are, so, too, are their creators.
The same is true of hope, especially at times such as these — imprints, impressions, the trappings of existence without a sighting thereof, yet it’s enough to instill the deep and mostly unconscious belief that the natural order of things is falling into place.
Even in the face of snow after Easter.
No, there’s nothing like the inches visible above; only a dusting, but sufficient to impart a deep and bitter chill all the same. The birds who made the imprints (or at least their siblings or cousins, fellow members of their clan) are visible everywhere, nesting, getting ready to lay or, in some instances, possibly already protecting young as yet unhatched. The magpies are year-round residents, after all, inhabitants as indigenous to this place as the light that turns their feathers iridescent.
But if they are scribes of a sort, the proof of their presence written in the snow, the singer of this season is the meadowlark. It is she whose song marks the first day of spring here, irrespective of calendar or equinox. They tend to arrive in pairs, or nearly so, these birds who bear the sun upon their breasts, marking the bounds of space and place by perching on fenceposts opposite each other, their duet across the acres between a call-and-response worthy of any ceremony or choir.
If the meadowlarks mark the boundaries of place, they do so of the day, as well. They are up with the dawn, singing the light across the sky and a new day into being, and they are there again just before the dusk, their song a lullaby for a sun descending to its rest. At these hours, in these days, theirs is one of the regularities of each day, a rare thing upon which the rest of our world can depend in a season otherwise predictable mostly in its unpredictability and absolute caprice.
Even once they depart for the year, we hear the bell-like burr of their call-and-response in memory: an imprint of another sort, one that can be summoned at any season and in every circumstance.
These are the bookends of our world now, and we need their stability to brace ourselves on an increasingly unsettled path.
We need the other gift they offer, too: the imprint of hope. On days when there is precious little proof of any essential or inherent goodness in the world, in days when the worst of what is seems determined to take hold of everything around us, these impressions — visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile — reassure us that there are aspects of our world that even the worst humanity offers has not yet been able to destroy, cycles and processes and presences as old as time itself, and as necessary.
We need not see the singer; we know her presence by her song. And like the shadow and substance of a better world, it is imprinted upon our souls . . . waiting for us to find it again.
~ Aji
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