It’s a Smile of Course

You could take my word for it.  I am, after all, 66 years old and have seen a thing or two.  I have climbed my way through the educational system, earning a diploma and a degree or two or three.  I have put in my years of employment of one kind or another - selling ice cream and communities, camps and congregations, eggs and tomatoes and a point of view.  Or two.  I have some credentials and credibility and some trips around the sun.  Whether the sum of any of that is wisdom is anyone’s guess, but nonetheless you could take my word for it.

Or you could consult the scientists who routinely ask questions and seek credible answers.  They have scanned the skies and attended conferences and published articles and calibrated distances and distilled the gases and charted the relevant rotations.  

You could retrieve the almanac, assuming you can remember where you shelved it, check the date and trust the ancient wisdom.  

You could consult the poets because poets, with their poetic eye and ear, routinely paint the truth and beckon us to stand beside them, shoulder to shoulder, and witness awes larger than life.  

We could flip through the scriptures, righteously and “rightly dividing the word of truth,” but chances are the verse we would land on is from the muttering Micah who would quietly shake his head and remind us, “God has shown you, O mortal, what is good.”

“Goodness,” we might exclaim by way of response, “is there anything good?”  

There is plenty to make us wonder. In my town a mother just killed her newborn.  At the Capitol they are passing laws that amount to suffocation.  At the bank they are wringing their hands - I am too when I look at my eroding reserves.  In Eastern Europe, Goliath is bombing David who, so far, is successfully slingshotting a few well-aimed stones in return.  And at schools, teachers must now set aside their teaching to assess genitalia and monitor bathroom access.  

We could ask the churches, but what ones haven’t fallen asleep are largely fighting amongst themselves and aren’t likely to hear the question.  Or are too busy gearing up for the Easter Egg Hunt to answer.

You could ask Siri or Alexa and they would surely have some well researched Wikipedia article to succinctly summarize the details.

Or, you could simply look up and draw your own conclusions - seeing for yourself that it is a smile - the moon whimsically offering a blessing for your night, your sleep, your punctuating period at the end of this day.  

A smile.  

It’s up there.  You could ask someone or never even notice.  Or in the process of walking the dog or turning off the light or peeking out the window or simply taking one last deep breath of this day, look up, zoom in, and claim it for yourself.  A smile.  The corners of Creation are curling upward in affirmation.

And returning a smile of your own - for whomever and whatever might need one - offering the world a blessed and happy “good night.”

Away with the Prevenient and on to the Vernal

 We planted seeds today - collards and kale, tomatoes and peppers, onions and leeks, and strawberries.  Not in the ground, mind you - it’s weeks too early for that.  The populated seed trays are destined for the greenhouse where they will, if our green-thumbed prayers are answered, stir and sprout and spread their eventual leaves.  But this is where it starts:  with seeds, the granular beginnings that tilt toward fruitfulness.  It seemed like the thing to do on the occasion of the Vernal Equinox - seeding, while also pondering when it last might have been that the word “vernal” showed up commonly in casual conversation.  It was certainly before my lifetime.  That’s a loss as I think about it.  Of all the words to drop out of our vocabulary, we can ill-afford to lose those connoting “freshness,” “newness”, and “of the spring.”  In a world whose cultural graces and political discourse seem iced into winter - clinched, hunched, curled inward - words bending toward growth and light strike me as precious enough to nurture.

Here, at least, then on this particular day when the Northern Hemisphere begins to tilt toward the sun thereby stretching the daylight and warming the air, we are reminded.  It is officially spring.  Life is officially new.  

At least the newness has begun.  Perhaps that is why I like the word “tilt” so much as a description of this nascent transition.  Nothing has plopped down upon us or fallen over on us.  It is far less dramatic, far more incremental than that.  Indeed, the casual observer might well have noticed no change at all from yesterday to today.  The Vernal Equinox is, as the rock band “Chicago” used to sing, “only the beginning.”

But it is a beginning.  And the testimony is prolific.  The hens are laying, the grass is greening, the bulbs are slightly emerging, and buds are bulging from seemingly every branch, from forsythia to fruit tree.  All that, plus it feels a little contagious - at least to a guy like me who has been feeling as stark and barren as the wintering trees, brittle limbs clattering in the wind.  Without going into detail, I haven’t been my best self.  Too much crankiness.  Too much judgment. Too much anger over what I can little influence.  Too much winter in my veins.  Too much frost in my heart.  I’ve needed a little tilt toward the sun.  I’ve needed a little vernal nudge.

Right on time, here we are.  

It is, as I noted, just the beginning.  But it is beginning.  Even Easter, the grandest vernality of all, is just around the corner - triggered by this very day, calculated as it is to rise on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

And so we tilt.  

Toward the sun.

Toward life emerging.

Toward - dare I say it? - fruit.

Tasting the Harvest in the Seed

 "The 'already' and the 'not yet.'"

Throughout my professional life that refrain was a theological abstraction - a principled affirmation that called attention to what the Creator had already accomplished among us, juxtaposed with all that was still in process but incomplete.  It was a tenet of faith; prayers of gratitude and petition clutching hands to step over the cracks in this sidewalk that is everyday life.  

But there is no abstraction here.  On the farmstead, the observation is palpably, descriptively real.  This is the "already" anticipatory season of concrete steps that makes any derivative "not yet" abundance possible.  We are busily pruning fruit trees - a wincing exercise of obligatory infanticide that trims branches already swelling with buds so that the remaining limbs can more vibrantly thrive.  Horticultural sprays will quickly follow, affording the trees every advantage against pests and disease that organic care can offer.  In the greenhouse, the first bags from the pallet of seed starting soil have been opened and blocked into trays now germinating the first of the garden seeds.  From this point forward, additional trays will be added weekly until springtime transplanting.  In the garden, Lori has been busy uprooting the dry remnants of last years vegetation clearing the way for fresh bed preparation to welcome those greenhouse seedlings that are still but twinklings in our horticultural eye.  

And if you cock your ear just right you will hear, from the deeper recesses of the barn, cheeps from the baby chicks in the brooder that will one day, if all goes well, join the older girls in the coops out back; and still later, wait their turn for time in the laying boxes to deposit their eggs.  

Such is the work "already" underway.  If we do it care-fully, attentively, patiently, good will come of it - eventually.  We might begin to find young eggs, should the chicks survive the precarities of growth and development and predation, some 20 weeks from now - August would be my guess; about the same time we are harvesting honey from the bees should their thriving and pollinating bless us with such.  Asparagus, that perennial first-fruit of spring, should begin to emerge mid-May as a "teaser" for the harvests to come - garlic dug in July, commencing the cascade of fruitings that will continue through autumn.  We won't get the first taste of tomatoes and peppers - the Crown Jewels of the garden - until August.  The trees won't offer their gifts until September and October - potatoes sometime between the tomatoes and the apples.

Today, while pruning a limb or starting a seed or feeding a chick, it all seems a long way off - a "not yet" that feels almost mythical.  

Which it will be if we don't commence the work now, already.

As with most of the harvests we hope for in life.

And beyond.