ENDLESS SPRING

     With fall having folded up its wrinkled colors to create space for forthcoming winter, this might seem a strange time to think of the high spirits of spring, but lately I’ve been meditating on what might be called the endlessness of spring – the ever-presence, we might say, of reawakening and restoration. Most of the leaves have dried up down to a dust-like substance, but even now they’re starting to encourage the soil in a silent way so an expansive resurgence can happen in the spring. The old leaves have left so that countless young and lively ones can come to the trees in April. Death has occurred only in order to let life start with freshness when warm weather makes its dependable return. But doesn’t death always trick us in this way, always try to tell us that life is over for good, when in fact it’s unfurling in an even fresher way in the face of sorrow itself? Doesn’t death always insist on our sadness and even our despair, when, in fact, right there where loss seems so devastating the rebirth of the vividness of life is ever occurring? Death does its dance of grief and heartache, but life in its never-ending fervor does its own invincible dance right beside it.