When the sun warms and turns to April there is little reason to travel far from home. Yet spring is the time of year when church, business, and non-profit meetings come out of the woodwork. Created within each of us, I imagine, is a springgene of sorts kicking in an emotional calling to engage in spiritual search. Sometimes with others. Sometimes alone. After winter’s indoor confinement and outdoors heavy coat and boots and pants and gloves, the light jacket of spring pulls upon an ancient inclination to watch newborn grass break ground, rabbits browsing upon breaking leaves of greasewood, or a hawk catching an updraft. However, much life has shifted from the body’s seasonal nature; too often we are left with little more than meetings and conferences to fill our post-winter emotional and spiritual needs.
Luck has it my away from home April meetings were canceled. Allowing springs call to give an ear to wind and an eye to landscape. Such good fortune should not be wasted but known for the joy to use winter’s learned skills of living quietly and slowly. In this season of rapid change, a bit of gentle listening and watching may just bring one close as Creation crafts birth, remembrance, and reconciliation. Yesterday’s mundane of cold and motionless explodes in this season—minutes, hours, days—to movement and action. To miss a spring moment is to miss a multitude of unknowns. The thought has me turn my collar up against a light but chilly breeze, leave the farm behind, and walk toward the ridge.
The drainage ditch is flowing unhurriedly as I reach it. A hen mallard slips from the reeds and ten hatchlings furiously paddle behind her. She stops paddling, the current carries her down through the brood to the last hatchling, she groups them up and moves them further upstream away from me. A good move, the ridge is downstream. I turn and walk away from them.
To the east a farm still has three-foot cornstalk in the field from Novembers harvest. Folk have turned cow-calf pairs into the field who now feed on the dry cornstalk. Grasses will soon have the height and sugars to become this season’s feed. Maybe the stalk will be enough, without buying more feed, to get the cattle to grass. The farmer to the west has stored feed remaining and is busy discing last fall’s cornstalk into the dirt. With a steady sound of a tractor behind me I reach the old wood-plank bridge that crosses a branch of Toppenish creek.
The creek is high, but its movement even less visible than that of the ditch. Cresting its banks sometime in the last few days, the creek tells the flood plain of warmer weather upstream. The road on the other side of the bridge has water flowing over it for the next thirty feet or better. Crossing to dry road means getting wet. Just how wet depends if water comes over my boot tops. I take the chance and hope for no more than two or three inches of water. A couple steps and I know luck isn’t mine today as boots fill with water who remembers itself as melting snow forty miles upstream. Fine then. I’ll count on a decent circulatory system and feet warming boot water. Soon. At water’s edge I leave the dirt road and walk downstream. Finding a piece of ground twenty feet from a small eddy I sit down. Grasses rise above my head. Read the rest of this entry »