from BARDO

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.

Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made

is star-stuff too?


– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –

dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.


Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.


Roselle Angwin

Friday, 10 May 2013

how to write about spring?

How can we write about spring? There's no way to speak of it without cliché – or maybe there is and I'm being lazy. But I also can't not speak of this miraculous uplifting green tide sweeping the land, clearing the moulder and debris and decay of the winter and recolonising the land and our psyches, here in the Northern hemisphere, almost, it seems to me, against all odds.

We with the widescale destruction caused by our ignorance and greed, our commodification of nature, make continuing renewal so hard, so seemingly almost impossible – and yet year after year spring does her thing in the cycles of seasonal change, in the swallows' and cuckoos' return, in the new nuthatch chicks and the tiny lambs, the badger cubs, the bluebells and orchids; in the floods of green and blossom, reminding us that nothing remains forever – not last summer's promise, not last autumn's harvest, not last winter's grief and darkness – but all is in a constant state of flux, renewal and transformation.

Spring reminds us that nothing in the psyche remains stuck forever, either – sorrow passes, personal joys pass; both will return.

What Brian Clarke calls 'the law of continuing' is where we can take refuge, the hope that's possible from knowing how to surf transience, find a more lasting promise of peace and a deeper sense of joy that is not determined by outer circumstances or personal temporary emotional instabilities...

4 comments:

  1. I remember going to the Normandy beaches and seeing how 'nature' had transformed the debris of our violence to each other, back into beauty.

    We do a lot of harm, but it's good to recognise hope when we see it.

    love
    Marg
    x

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  2. Marg, that's beautifully expressed, and poignant too. And uplifting - thank you. Rx

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  3. Always a surprize. The energy and the colours and the smells and the, and the, and the, and the, Oh it's so lovely I feel like singing like a cuckoo. Here we have the Golden Orioles and the nightingales almost shouting to be heard across the valleys. Sigh.And the flowers! whole fields, whole hillsides, whole districts up to our elbows in blossom and thick with pollen. May is truly the month of miracles.

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  4. Veronica, thank you. I love the passions and energy in what you said; and how poetic is THIS: '...whole fields, whole hillsides, whole districts up to our elbows in blossom and thick with pollen...' Rx

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