May – The World Awakens

In the high country the frozen snow begins to flow with the warmth of spring!
Trickles turn to torrents.
Mist rises from the snowfields and the waterfalls, causing even the air to enrich the earth with new life.

In Yosemite (the photo to the right) only the highest places still hold frozen snowfields from winter now.
Their cold stillness has birthed action, and fed the flow of the waterfalls.
Even the waterfalls that aren’t usually there, spring to life, dancing with the joy of movement, of falling, of flow.

In the valleys below, as in the second photo, the frozen places have burst into color and delight with a profusion of flowers – explosions of color turning the formerly grey flood plains along the river into decorations beyond belief, and the hillsides into upliftments of spirit as well as body.

The natural world, each year without fail, gives us this metaphor for our own movement, for our own evolving way of being here in our lives, of letting ourselves come alive. We can get so caught in the little stuff and forget to look to the metaphor of spring, playing out its inspiration in front of our eyes every year.

Even beyond that, the natural world also constantly offers a look behind the changing scenes, the details of our lives, even the flow of change of our living and dying, as we look to what doesn’t change.

Below is a piece from “Finding Our Way Forward“. It is from a longer poem “The Bedrock” (also coming from the grandeur of Yosemite) which is seeing in the rock beneath the flowing water and the ebb and flow of the seasons a larger movement, requiring more quiet to discern, but definite and palpable:

The bedrock lets me know my place
in the larger scheme of things.
My human life is a flash
in a broad interplay of life and time,
insignificant when seen separately
yet held now inseparably
within the greater life
animating the whole.
The bedrock speaks
in a language without words
that feels familiar,
that beckons, no, welcomes me
back to the sanity
of something longer, quieter and more steady
that I had nearly forgotten.
It is an open invitation
to relax into an expanded perspective
that includes me in something grand,
beyond the breadth of galaxies.
Something vibrantly alive, and close,
Something right here,
in the center of this human life.