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.