Between Winter & Spring: A Bridging Time

Our mufflers and mittens have been stored away. Our boots and heavy coats packed up. The porch furniture came out today. The forsythia is in bloom. The Jays are building a nest in the eaves outside the bedroom window and the Mallards are mating.

But our nights are cold and the days are only almost warm. Each day I think, "Ah, today I'll dress for Spring," but before breakfast ends I've put on socks and a sweater. Not long ago I trotted out to get the paper, ready for a warmer day and stepped right into powered sugar morning. Everything from forest floor beneath my feet to the pines above on the highest mountain peaks was covered with a light coating of snow.

Even our house isn't warm yet. Winter lingers in the corners. Outside the Poplars still have no leaves. Some days it's warmer outside for a few hours than inside and I throw open the windows to let in the fresh air. Other days we still turn on the fire.

It takes awhile to get from where we've been to where we're headed. We're in the bridging time.

I don't know why I'm impatient for Spring this year. I usually love for Winter to linger, as it tends to do here in the mountains sometimes even into June.

Maybe it's because we're also in a bridging time in our lives and in our country. Most all of us are in some stage of bridging from a more predictably affluent, convenient way of life to something less certain and not so plush and efficient as we've grown accustomed to.

Unlike nature, though, which always takes its time and doesn't mark seasons by a calendar, we tend to want to know when things will start and stop. We like clear demarcations. We like our weather and our lives to be "good." We don't like uncertainty. We want a reliable weather man. Yet this is a time a great uncertainty.

So Spring maybe taking on a new meaning. It's arrival may give us hope of a return to what we've known. Certainly it has always been synonymous with new beginnings. Perhaps that is how we would be best served to look for meaning this Spring. Not as a return to a fantasy way of life where we can grow and grow and borrow, and borrow and accumulate ever more and more - bigger, better, faster. But instead a bridge to a new way of life that doesn't put our households, our livelihoods, our families, our nation, and our Earth in such jeopardy.

Today being a pleasantly sunny, almost warm afternoon, we were outside chatting with our next door neighbor. "It's so lovely out today," we were all exclaiming. Then our neighbor said "I'm so glad to hear positive news about the economy! So glad to get away from all the endless spreading of fear."

I had to think about that for a moment. Yes, I hate to see us driven by fear, yet my fear is that we'll think we can go back to living beyond our means - personally, nationally, and on a planetary level. Then we will have much to fear. That's what got here. But fear has brought us in line. Shaped us up. We're spending less, saving more, living more simply, learning to do many things for ourselves we'd nearly forgotten how to do. Now the ardors of a recessionary winter are beginning to ease. New ways of life are budding.

It's a bridging time. Can we cross the bridge to an yet undefined way of life we'll participate in shaping, not from fear of living forever in a harsh Winter, but in anticipation of a new Spring?

Blessings of Nature
Sarah

Fall's Lessons: Allowing the Wonder

“The senses, being the explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge.” Maria Montessori

As I began to write about the lessons of this fall, my first thought was that Fall has been late in coming. It slipped right by me unrecognized as I was waiting of it to come dressed in a familiar uniform.

Fall usually comes early here in our mountains. So early that we have our October Fest in August. Fall is crisp September days when the streets become arbors of golden Poplars strewn with carpet of gold and red leafs and chilly nights shining clear in star-strewn skies. But not this year. The above picture from years past doesn't resemble our mountain this year. Oh, the Poplars did turn golden and their leaves did fall, but they were quickly whisked away by warm Santa Ana winds and browned where they lay by a hot October and November sun. They stand here now mostly naked with their lacy branches tall in the warmth of another seventy-degree day.

The fresh evergreen Christmas wreath my mother sends each year for our front door seems strangely out of place in our bright and balmy mid days.

Fall just hasn't matched up with our image image of what it should be. But who says how fall should be? Isn't it just such preconceptions that keep us from enjoying the wonder of the unexpected, the unusual, and the novel? What have I missed by overlooking this year's unique presence?

A similar question came to mind recently while waiting to register for an appointment. The receptionist asked the young woman in line ahead of me if she had a nice Thanksgiving. "I've had better," she replied. Having pondering our preconceptions about fall, I immediately thought what were her preconceptions, all of our preconceptions, about Thanksgiving is? And how do such preconceptions keep up from being fully thankful not only on that special holiday, but everyday?

Now I'm wondering about winter. Officially it's only 17 days away and we have many preconceptions about that season, especially the Christmas holiday with snow and mistletoe, city sidewalks dressed in holiday cheer, and chestnuts roasting o'er an open fire. But what will this winter and this Christmas actually be like? What wonder might it bring if we don't miss it while looking for the Christmas we imagine?

Preconceptions take the wonder of life. The act of wondering, anticipating, not knowing, is the doorway to wonder.

The Poplars certainly didn't miss the presence of our typical fall. They greeted their late and hurried undressing and embraced its newness as any other. Might we greet this winter in just such a way? Letting it unfold in its own novel and idiosyncratic way? Might it be all the more wonder-filled if we set our preconceptions aside and welcome this winter and this holiday season anew?

Might life itself be a more rewarding adventure if we greeted each day in that way

Blessings of Fall
Sarah

Living in wonder is a natural expression of our attraction to those things in life that fulfill and nurture us. It is an on-going acknowledgement of our gratitude for all that sustains us.

Summer's Tough Lesson: We Are Resilient

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood." Ralph Waldo Emerson

The slender, tall Jeffrey by our deck is weeping. The summer has been a difficult one for our forest. We're suffering through another drought. The lake is low; once bubbling streams have slowed to trickles; and as the bark beetles attack the Jeffries and Ponderosas, to fight them off, they weep long strands of sap that glisten in the sun like a shiny trail of tears.

One way or another, it's been an unusually difficult summer in most regions. Not only has there been drought, but also floods, fires, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Nature's ways have been creating woes for flora, fauna and humans alike. And we've suffered a fair share of man made woes as well. Sky high gas prices, failing banks, foreclosures and bankruptcies hitting new highs, inflation, pink slips, and growing debts have left so many of us from young families to solitary seniors and mom and pop stores to big lenders and automakers hanging on by their fingertips.

But our forest is resilient. The massive Ponderosas stand stalwart on this land as they have for hundreds upon hundreds of years. The rocky creek beds still carve their path through the land as they have through time. Newborn Jeffries still abound, dwarfed beneath their parents, their tiny branched reaching for the sun, bending if need be to reach its rays.

On days when the news headlines strike fear in the heart, I take comfort in the lessons of these trees, this forest. They remind me that, like them, we are resilient too. We are descendants of survivors ... are we not? Or have we become spoiled and weakened by the oversolicitude and overindulgence during recent times of seeming national prosperity?

Resilience: the capacity to hold together, absorb disruptive shocks, and maintain one's ability to continue functioning in the face of change.

When a tree is felled, the history of its resilience is visible in the rings of its trunk . The thick rings reflect its growth in favorable climates with abundant rainfall and good growing conditions. The thin rings show its response to poor growing conditions, lack of rain, or the presence of natural disasters such as droughts, floods, volcanoes, even fires.

Our resilience, of course, is not so obvious to the eye. But it is visible in our eyes. Do we wilt? Are we agog, so blinded by favorable times that we ignore what we don't want to see? Or do we, like the trees, respond with determined effort, hunker down, contract our ways, curtail the bubbly so to speak, and savor the trickles that remain?

Too often the choices we make seem to rest on a trick our mind plays with us. A trick called prediction. If we predict a positive future, we tend to be optimistic in the present and behave as if we need not change or can direct change to our favor. If we predict a difficult future, we tend to be pessimistic about the present and try to prevent or avoid the need to change if at all possible.

This forest that is my home knows of neither optimism nor pessimism. It knows not if there will be rain this fall or a heavy snow pack next spring. We don't know either, but we like to think we can. We undertake all sorts of efforts to predict what is to come, even if we have to make it up with a dose of "positive thinking," instead of responding to what is here and now before us.

To be like the forest is to avoid this mind game of ours and throw our selves fully into life that is, contracting when we need to contract, expanding when we can do so without harm.

To be like the forest is to endure. To ignore its lessons is perish.

Blessings of a tough summer,
Sarah Edwards