"Meditation on Early April"
It is so nice out here! It's nice to have a change. I used to feel mortified if I had to sit by myself at lunch, but now I kind of enjoy it.
The air is warm and sweet, the sunlight golden on the grass. That grass is just now waking from its long sleep; I see sudden gleams of summer in the mien of the season. Is it any wonder I love spring so much?
Oh Spring, the dawning sun
Of new life, resurrected from the tomb
Of winter: How you warm one
With childlike flowers springing from your womb!
Let your sweet breezes sweep away
The dead leaves of long-forgotten sin,
And let there grow, in your gold day,
New joys that leap and enter in
Our springtime souls. "Come forth!"
He cried to Lazarus, his friend;
He cries it now to east, and north,
And south, and west, without an end,
And raises Spring's breeze to brush death away
And golden flowers to greet the day.
The sweetness and simplicity is breath-taking, even with the increased noise of more people. "Most, O Maid's Child, Thy choice and worth the winning."
Those birds high in those waking trees
Have sent a call upon the breeze
That bids my soul to fly away
And join them in the songs of day.
Held back by chains of vein and flesh
That soul jolts forward in my breast;
If feel it fluttering to its knees,
Longing to leave me and light in those trees.
The garlic along the mudtrail last night made darker lines across the lush green of the landscape, its matte surface revealing its darker hue by the gleaming grass. And both were beautiful. There is no law of diminishing returns in nature; one morning glory in a field is no more or less beautiful than if the field were full of them. And in joy, there are no opportunity costs, for every experience of joy, howsoever brief, fills us with the entire measure; for joy is reality, and how can one real thing be less real than another? And there is no conservation of energy in praise, for God creates energy from fatigue, and there is never conservation of love, for no matter how much love we give, we constantly receive it back in greater and greater measure, though the Source of love never has less nor more of it. The entire world in spring bursts at the seams with Infinite, Paradoxical Joy; April is the month of my spiritual birth, and if I had the choice to name my soul, I'd name it Springtime, and that would say it all.
The world is full of light. There is light even in the shadows, even at midnight. It is everywhere--there is even an ever-present beam of it in the dark crevases of my soul! If light can reach that sealed-off and silent place, it can flood in anywhere, through the smallest crack. So break every part of me, God, expand every hair-line fracture, and flood me with light in every separate part! Like spring's green juice in every twig of that tree. Amen.
