Renewal
This was the first full day home. Such times can be a letdown, certainly—you're doing exciting vacation stuff and the mundane problems of your daily life are far away, and you come down from all that with a bump when you get home.
But that's not how it was, really.
The problems are there, don't get me wrong. Not "issues," not "challenges," these are problems. But I sat out on my back porch today and felt the sun on my face. It's late winter, but spring is filtering in, like grass through the cracks in the concrete, gently irresistible. This morning, sitting in my office, I saw the snow melting in the back yard, and I heard birds singing.
Where I was, in the tropics, there were beautiful birds—there were always frigatebirds gliding about, and once I saw a dozen of them in the evening sky, with the crescent moon and a blazing Venus among them. Magnificent, they were. But the problem is that it's always summer in the tropics. The world is always brassily alive. Back home, in the good old temperate zone, we have seasons. Nature dies, and comes back to life. I once made an innocent reference to the magic of spring, and a deeply cynical young woman I worked with thought it was funny. But if there's a more profound magic than life returning to something that was dead, I don't know what it might be.
Some 700 years ago, Chaucer listed the things that happen in the spring that encourage people to go on pilgrimages, and one of them was "smale fowles maken melodye." Is it obvious and trite to notice that the birds are singing, and the world is renewing itself? Chaucer didn't think it so. And neither do I. And that's one reason I was glad to be home today.
But that's not how it was, really.
The problems are there, don't get me wrong. Not "issues," not "challenges," these are problems. But I sat out on my back porch today and felt the sun on my face. It's late winter, but spring is filtering in, like grass through the cracks in the concrete, gently irresistible. This morning, sitting in my office, I saw the snow melting in the back yard, and I heard birds singing.
Where I was, in the tropics, there were beautiful birds—there were always frigatebirds gliding about, and once I saw a dozen of them in the evening sky, with the crescent moon and a blazing Venus among them. Magnificent, they were. But the problem is that it's always summer in the tropics. The world is always brassily alive. Back home, in the good old temperate zone, we have seasons. Nature dies, and comes back to life. I once made an innocent reference to the magic of spring, and a deeply cynical young woman I worked with thought it was funny. But if there's a more profound magic than life returning to something that was dead, I don't know what it might be.
Some 700 years ago, Chaucer listed the things that happen in the spring that encourage people to go on pilgrimages, and one of them was "smale fowles maken melodye." Is it obvious and trite to notice that the birds are singing, and the world is renewing itself? Chaucer didn't think it so. And neither do I. And that's one reason I was glad to be home today.
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