Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

As the sun climbs the sky, the days take on that remembered glint, the one that comes with green and growing things; yet, because this is halfway to the northpole, it does so glancing off snow cover and enlightening cold air.  It feeds no flowers, no leaves on trees, no viny processes.  Even its warming leaks away as it bounces off the high albedo white.  No season gives way in straight sets.  Well, not usually.  Though here in Minnesota it does sometimes seem that we skip that warm and scented time plunging instead into the heat and insects of summer.

Still the heart knows and so might that tiny organ located somewhere inside our enlarged brains; you know, the one that would help us navigate by the northstar if only we stopped thinking so damn much, the one that says, oh, this is the time to pick up our family and move to the valley where the warmth will have broken free the streams and perhaps some edible grasses have begun to grow.  Let’s go.  Let’s go.

But no.  We no longer listen to that impulse.  Instead we investigate the numbered calendar, read thermometers, measure the angle of sun.  Wait anxiously for the whirring and blinking of large machines eating those numbers and so many more, past numbers and ideas of how one effects the other.  Then, the model speaks.  But, like early man who built his tower toward the sky hoping to join the Gods, these machines cannot speak in one voice.  This means we wait.  Watching the sun climb, the ice melt.  Waiting for the green.