The Urgent Awakening of Now

Wendell Berry once commented about the season of deep winter as the time when, “the present has abated its urgencies” (The Long-Legged House).  

For the past ten years especially I have enjoyed that to be true.  That, in the same way that spring has come to be the season when the urgencies of the present re-engage.  

It was less than 2 weeks ago that we were yet again shoveling snow from the porch and driveway.  Five inches of heavy, wet flakes had fallen along with the temperature after an unseasonably warm week.  Even still the nights, as often as not, drop below freezing. But it is undeniable that the seasons are changing.  Warmer days are gradually arm-wrestling winter to the table despite the latter’s occasional bursts of strength.  And suddenly the tasks present themselves.  

Already we are filling seed trays and nestling them into the greenhouse.  It won’t be long until the garden soil is workable, opportunistically between the frost and the mud. There will be beds to reclaim and refresh, irrigation tapes to reestablish and realign, seed plots to allocate, and, with breathtaking speed, weeds to attack.  The rain barrels will need to be positioned and the downspouts reconfigured to feed them.  The compost will need to be spread.  The snow blower on the tractor will need to be unhitched and moved aside on behalf of the mowing deck whose labors will soon be called upon.  

And when it all commences in earnest - when it thunders toward us like an oncoming train - it will feel to us like it needs to all happen at once.  All with the urgency with which we have ached, these recent months, for spring itself.

Rabbits are already exploring the open spaces along the edge of the woods, and birds have resumed their familiar music.  

Life, in ways both airy and earthy, is stirring.  

Slowly.

Quietly.

But with startling acceleration.

And it’s good, these palpable signs of greening, given the iciness that so tenaciously grips and paralyzes the world’s relational fecundity.  We need the crocuses and daffodils and robins and buds to teach us again how to swell, fat, with vigor.  We need role models of thawing and softening and turning toward the light.  We need tutors in daily song; coaches in the calisthenics of breaking through the crusted earth and stretching upward and outward.  

We need the dangling promise of harvest, even if the ripe juice of it is still months away.

But for now it is work enough to acknowledge the shift of the equinox, and submit to its coaxing.  Just the hint of it emerging - the tiny glimpse of the green of it - is enough to get us moving...

...with the urgency it demands.

The Silence of a Sobered Morning

The local meteorologists were tracking the storm path with their usual euphoric chatter. The television was on, and then it went dark.

 

The cell phone tornado warnings alarmed in our hands, and then went silent. 

 

The air was eerily still, and then it wasn’t. 

 

The lights glowed beneath the angry sky, and then they didn’t. 

 

The generator kicked on. The chickens huddled inside their coops, not unlike us in our basement. 

 

The rains sheeted down, the winds snarled, and just beyond our reach, the tornado knifed its way through town, across the county, and then beyond.

 

And missed us.  But we were among the fortunate.  Nearby, seven people lost their lives.  I have to sit with that for a moment.  Lives.  Lost.  From a storm that passed perhaps a half-mile from our home.  We’ve since seen the power lines draping the roads; the carcasses of trees tracing the line.  We’ve since heard of horses moved from barns deprived of their roofs, businesses invaded by the elements, homes battered.  Families displaced.

 

Morning confirmed that Taproot Garden passed the night unscathed.  Not even broken branches.  We awoke to power restored, blue skies – a blank-faced, mischievous morning trying to act like it had not misbehaved in the night.  

 

I released and fed the chickens who were happy for the daylight.  I walked the dogs.  I watered the seed trays in the greenhouse and tried to pretend that this was simply another ordinary day.  But the pretense was deafened by the echo of the hollowness.  

 

I know otherwise.

I know the truth.

This is not simply another ordinary day.

 

Line crews worked through the night to retrieve dangling cables and to restore electrical service.  Road crews worked through the night to bulldoze trees off the roadways.  People picked through their rubble to reclaim the precious, the salvageable.  Insurance adjusters arrived early on the scene to begin the grim assessment of destruction.

 

And families, scissored by death, sat in silence, facing into the disbelief and the inexpressible, untraceable future.  

 

A half-mile away.

 

Anything but just another day.