"If winter comes, can spring be far behind? - P. B. Shelley
Whenever it really comes down heavy, I get ready to head out for my walk, because the sun will soon be out. Big downpours clear the sky, I've noticed.
Change is slow, no matter which way you want it to go. But we can all agree that spring is beautiful.
Will we wisen up fast enough for our ever growing technological power, I wonder.
I fret and worry that we cannot change as fast as we need to now, but a walk in the natural world in the spring harmonizes my soul. It brings up something like hope. Who cannot welcome rainbows and perfumed violets and sunshine after months of cold and gray?
The fabulously glamorous and fancy Wood Duck pair pays a visit to the pond Wood Ducks fly low through through the woods, visiting little ponds like this one.
The pond develops orange patches. On closer observation they are goldfish, perhaps fifty to seventy five of them, hovering in place together, like an orange tree, or a squadron of little florescent orange blimps in the pond sky.
These are the cohort of last year's baby fish, about five inches long, that have survived the winter. This, despite me witnessing the great blue heron swooping in and gobbling several glittering bright fish only a couple of days ago. Makes me wonder why these fish are so very, very bright orange.
The orange blob of fish coheres. They seem to be into eating the newly grown green mossy plant things which drift in puffy clumps here and there, on the abundant swollen winter rain washed pond.
I give Charlene, the Pond Pearl, a gentle kick, through the air and back over to the main pond from the seasonal side creek where the wind has blown it. As the ripple of disturbance that Charlene's arrival causes reaches the little school, the entire flotilla imperceptibly sinks in unison. Were they even really there at all? Oh yes, I took a picture of them.
The biophelia induced by this glorious spring day guides me to the realization of another glimpse of the vision of the flower child's garden planet for peace and love:
Don't lose heart. Even like the debut of spring, when the time is ripe for change it can be dramatically, efficiently, exuberantly fast.
Only days ago, eight inches of snow was the view from my window. I could no longer even see color properly because the sunlight was so scarce. Dimness and dampness surrounded us as we huddled around the warmth of our personal devices.
Now it's only a couple of weeks later. The clouds part and it is as if the red curtains open, the lights go on, and spring roars onstage with dancers and flowers twirling in a sun sparking rainbow drenched kaleidoscope!
This is like my vision for the future, the flower child's garden planet, and we can start now. Or more like, we can continue on, for it has been well underway for quite a while.
In the beginning things are often bumpy and chaotic, like now. Like spring, especially before the colors come out. I write this in March, about which they say "in like a lion and out like a lamb".
But all of the gratuitous beauty, potential, and hope embodied in the moment of spring is also found in this moment in the world. We are not doomed to blow the whole thing up, even though we stand on many dangerous precipices.
We have incredible natural resources in the form of our shared knowledge due to the information revolution, which has itself come of age in the internet. Any given minute, the whole world is full of individuals who are waking up, smartening up, wising up.
I do not care what your economic philosophy is, if it does not take into account the tremendous riches of knowledge we all suddenly now share, you have missed the bus. This is a quantum leap from arithmetic to multiplicative.
Today the world is full of answers, solutions, and caring people-who can find each other. We are quite simply all wealthier when we share. We are riding a great wave of wealth composed and generated by sharing. (For example: check it out, Kindspring)
We are greater than the sum of our parts. But this dimension of our newly acquired abundance may not be obvious from every standpoint. People see things when they are relaxed enough to ask.
It is no mean feat to relax at a time like this. But please be patient, as each individual root gathers pure snowmelt water, and abides. Your own little flower, curled up tightly in your hope of spring, is your own soul garden. Open your own petals in your own hearts' way, as you wish, and rejoice with everyone in the beauty of our shared meadow of awakening love.
Alternately, this momentous time is but a flashing shaft of light as the clouds of bedazzled ignorance and manipulated fear close in around us once again for another dark and repressive age. Of course it is impossible to predict since everyone has choices.
I wonder what we will choose.
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
- Pablo Neruda
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