It is early March.

The sky is a blanket of grey as I hurry my son out the door at 8:15am. We walk single file by the side of the road towards his school. It is quick steps and continually prodding him forward, as I try to ensure he makes it to school before the bell. He is jabbering on about something he saw recently on YouTube, but I’m not really listening. I am lost in a hundred buzzing thoughts, none of which I can recall later I nod and say “uh huh” at the right moments. We reach the edge of the schoolyard, and I hug him tight, wish him a great day, and watch for a long while as he ascends the steps towards his class.

I turn away as his profile disappears behind a brick walled corner, and begin back down the hill, intending to return home quickly. I have only taken a few steps before I realize that something has changed. The hue of the light. The sky is the same pale grey, but beneath it, everything is illuminated differently.  Those previously familiar and sterile surroundings suddenly spring to life: The scurry of movement in the bushes beside me, as a family of nervous quails takes flight into the gully below; The call and answer of two lone redwing blackbirds amidst the half frozen pond; a cluster of wild crocus peeking out between fallen grass. And the sound of water everywhere, as if mother nature had left all the water taps a quarter turn from closed. It is the sound of the thaw, more than the sight of it. It drips slowly off the trees, seeping into the ground and gathering in the gully below where I can hear it running softly under foot as I step over the culvert at the base of the hill.  

The light, the sounds, even the sensation of the gentle breeze on my neck are nudging me. They are all in on the joke. I am the halfwit coming to the punchline late. 

Surely the season has shifted, and I was not aware of it.

Despite my dumbfoundedness and previous ignorance to my surroundings, this is the advantage of repetition, a practice or familiarity with something, someone, or somewhere. My son’s school bell draws me to the same path, at the same time, daily for years. I have seen this exact landscape hundreds of times. Today, something has shifted. Today there is running water, the chirping of birds, and the play of the light. It is the beginning of spring, just as it is every single year, and somehow I still find myself caught off guard by it’s coming. 

Of course, I haven’t been looking very closely lately. 

Lately I’ve been walking only the minimum before returning quickly to home and closing the door to the outside world. I’ve been shirking the work of silence and long walks to clear my head. I’ve felt more irritable and despondent than usual, especially when I sit down and attempt to write. I feel like I am hiding from myself, endlessly wanting to turn to anything that numbs or distracts. Anything that moves the clock forward to a better time, where we are okay. It has been a while since I have felt that we are.

I don’t know why this is so important to me, this concept of our communal health. The constant tension that has been in the air had found a way into my bones. In so many obvious and obscure ways I have been convinced that we are not okay, and so neither am I.. I have been mourning the ways we talk over one another and deliberately misunderstand and diminish each other. I am haunted by the truth that we live among each other in separate and incompatible realities. That the collective “we” has never been so divided and hostile, as we sneer down our nose at our neighbor. That I am sneering and hostile, and so easily angered.

Writing, for better or worse, has always been a personal and collective assessment. How am I doing? How are we all doing? What do I need? What do we all need? For a long while I haven’t liked the answer to the first two questions, and I have had no firm answers on the last two. It feels like we have been frozen in place, unable or unwilling to move forward, and I have felt as stuck as a frozen pond.

But suddenly that which was frozen all around is beginning to thaw. 

The thaw and promise of the days ahead loosens something within me as well. I reach the bottom of the hill and choose to walk a little further as I take in the sights and sounds of the path before me. 

Despite the promise of oncoming spring, early March’s thaw is anything but picturesque. Trampled grey and brown grasses and dead plants line the edge of the path before me. The snow and ice are receding from the edges and pockmarked along the path by heavy footfalls, revealing all that was hidden beneath. Decomposing leaves stick together in every hue of brown and thick mud sticks to the bottom of my boots like tar. Most noticeably though, the potholes in the melting snow reveal thawing and decomposing dog feces long left unattended by their owners on countless winter walks. 

It’s not much to look at, but you do watch where you step.

In time the path before me will be bursting with new life. Pale pink wild roses, golden balsamroot flowers, and endless stalks of tall grass will shoot up near the small stream. More birds will come, more quail hiding under bushes, more redwing blackbirds calling to each other amongst the dense cattails. The trail will be a mosaic of green. 

I know we don’t get to that idyllic scene in April or May without the mud and feces and decomposing leaves of March. The one includes the other.

What nature offers me, especially in times of crisis or great personal unrest, is a reminder that everything can belong, my despondent and frustrated self included. In time, nature reveals and includes all. The freezing as well as the melt, the rot as well as the new shoots of grass. The death of one season to give birth to the next. 

I wonder how much of my distress has been due to my unwillingness to accept things as they are right now. To accept my own grief and anger and dispondance as natural. To accept that some things are frozen, or dead, or rotting, but that they will not stay that way forever. To accept that even the parts of our communal life which seem as repulsive as rotting dog feces will be included in the life we are making together. I don’t have to condone or excuse behavior that I believe is destructive or unhelpful, but I do have to accept that it exists.

One of my teachers, Richard Rohr often remarks that “we must forgive reality for it being what it is”. Nothing remains hidden forever. Perhaps the revealing of things long hidden is always a part of the process.

Nature reminds me to be patient. Patient with myself, with others, and with these times of transition. Each and every single one of us is in process right now. Nothing stays frozen forever.                                

Because the season is shifting, and so are we.