Let’s take a break from the hubbub and celebrate spring

On Tuesday at precisely 12:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the world changed.

You may not have noticed it as you worked, studied, ate or played, but a new order was born around you.

And whether you saw it or not, the clock on the wall or your cellphone signalled the start of something great.

In the northern hemisphere, it’s called spring. To some, the beginning of this season is an esoteric astronomical event, the first of two, yearly equinoxes that occur when the planet Earth, in its endless journey around the sun, tilts so its axis is momentarily perpendicular to the sun’s rays.

When this happens, the length of days and nights are basically equal around the world.

But for Canadians, such scientific explanations translate into something more profound and viscerally experienced.

Winter is over.

Congratulations are due all around. We have come through another brutal season of ice and snow, of Arctic air that bit through our parkas and chewed on our bones.

Our backs ached when we shovelled driveways. Our bare fingers burned when we chipped frozen sleet off our windshields.

We grumbled and stumbled through grey days and black nights.

Some of us, to be sure, revelled in skiing down pristine, white slopes, playing pond hockey or inhaling the frigid air on a sunny

January afternoon.

But if we citizens of the true north are honest, whatever winter’s perks may be, we’ve had enough.

Across southern Ontario, the trilling of Red-winged Blackbirds newly returned from the south or the trumpeting of Tundra Swans flying overhead to distant, northern nesting grounds are nature’s orchestra accompanying the new season.

And there, beside some sun-washed walls, you can already discern soft, green tips breaking through soil still gripped by frost.

The sap is running in the sugar bushes. Crocuses, daffodils and tulips will soon unfold. As days grow longer and temperatures rise, the trees will bud then burst into green leaf. The world will soon have more splendour, sound and life — including life newly born. Hockey playoffs are coming. Then baseball season.

“So what?” some will say, insisting there are bigger things in the human world that should concern us more. Who has Donald Trump just fired? Who has Vladimir Putin just given the finger? Who will win the next election?

Why are so many democracies in retreat while new dictatorships advance, and how did Facebook become such an appalling example of antisocial, social media?

These are worthy subjects to tax wise intellects any day of the year.

But on this day and at this time, let’s put aside our anxieties, go outside as far from the malls and traffic as we can get and take a deep, lung-swelling breath of spring air in this beautiful place called Ontario. And let’s celebrate.

We live in a human world but also a natural one. The seasons change so swiftly around us and this week’s infant spring will grow until, three months from now, it matures into summer.

There are some things bigger, endlessly more wonderful and far closer to eternal than we are.

Such is spring.

Congratulations are due all around. We have come through another brutal season of ice and snow