The Great Wheel

Spring                                              Waxing Flower Moon

As spring winds down toward Beltane on May 1st, the green up has taken on an accelerated pace.  We have leaves on trees like the Amur Maples, ash and feathery new leaves on the oaks as well.   The daffodils and tulips have brightened our April for some weeks now.  The more integrated I become to this property and its transitions, the more I can layer them in my head.  That is, as this moment of greening and flowering promises a new season, the needed resurrection of the plant world, I can also see late August and September when the florescence begins to yield to brown, to decay, to dieing back.  The two are not polar opposites but places on a continuum that extends not only from season to season but from year to year, decade to decade, century to century.

This layered sensibility is one of the privileges of staying in place, where the rhythms of the land call different things out of me.   As Rachel Carson said, “There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrain of nature–the assurance that dawn comes after night, spring after winter.”

This rhythm, the Great Wheel, teaches us about our experience of life, about life’s ongoing struggle against entropy, a struggle always lost, yet a struggle always valiant and often joyful even though destined to end in tragedy.

I hope your life has a springtime right now, one in which the trees have begun to leaf out, the daffodils have bloomed and the first vegetables have started their journey toward your table.