Longer, warmer days find me everywhere but inside at my laptop. This is a good thing. On my knees in the flowerbeds, weeding for hours yesterday with the sun on my face and a flock of chickens surrounding me felt like heaven on earth. Granted I have a quarter sized raw place in the palm of my right hand from pushing the trowel beneath 10,000 deeply rooted dandelions, clumps of grass, and hawkweed. You know I can not wear garden gloves that separate me from the tactile pleasures of the soil. Last night I was that good kind of tired, slept deeply, and awoke to a cardinal calling me from bed at daylight. My knobby old fingers were sore and a bit stiff reaching across the frets for a little morning music, but I was happy, and definitely felt like singing. Another day begins.
Supper never graces the table til after dark now, and it will continue to come later and later, as the daylight grows into the summer. These are changes I longed for all winter. Each morning I feel Walt Whitman’s, “A Child Went Forth…Everything I see becomes who I am…” for a stretch of minutes or hours, lost in time. The spiral brings me back to childhood, adolescence, and years of being a young mother. Returning to this season of doing, blooms of tulips, periwinkle and forsythia may as well be the same ones I played beside in my Mama’s garden, the same ones where the pleasures of romance found me at college, or the same ones planted so hopefully in the empty yard of a tiny rental house with a baby cooing on my back. Everything changes, yet everything remains the same. I know this blue sky, this nearly neon green grass, this gusty warm air like the lines on my face. And I can close my eyes and be the tomboy child, the barefoot girl in a long dress, and the young woman wanting to make a home for a family. So much has changed, but all those incarnations are alive and real, just waiting for permission to come out and play. The years fall away…a tear, a smile. I feel it in my heart, my belly.
If we are formed by our experiences, I believe it is the experiences out in this place of doing that form us. Spring always declares a beginning. Open the windows. Turn the soil and plant something. Clean and organize. We are getting ready for the fullness of what comes next. The buzz of life calls to us to use our minds and bodies, to notice, to begin, but mostly to remember the all of who we are and what we know. Shake off the amnesia. Let the child go forth to wander. Let the desire of first love reawaken. Let long ago dreams polish present ones. Long ago I may not have imagined myself filled with delight in finding worms to hand feed my hens, or in “manure meditation”( the process of picking up the barn lot in silence, broken only by natural chanting from all parts of the farm and woods). But the dreams of a little girl in Buster Browns, playing with her plastic horses in the rocks by the forsythia bushes give such a shine to the dreams I live on such mornings.
