Spring’s arrival says, ‘My world is back’
Nature’s annual awakening is golden opportunity for us to stop and smell the flowers
This has to be the coolest way to awake on a Sunday morning — in the embrace of Cinderella spring.
Usually at 7 a.m., particularly after this winter when southern Ontario became northern Ontario, I shudder and curl back up in my warm-as-toast sleeping bag.
But today, as fresh air tickles me through openings in the log walls, I sit up to be serenaded by blue jays, robins and starlings singing up a storm. Hallelujah, the silence of winter has hibernated! Birds are the town criers of the new season. There’s a theory that early humans mimicked their songs, then refined them into the spoken languages we know today.
As I poke outside, with a baby blanket slips around my shoulders, the air has gone so soft and the misty breeze is a beautiful woman’s fingers through what’s left of my hair. April has finally melted January.
My first reaction was to analyze, but being a thinker has at times made me ill with stress. Thought can be considered our magnificent sixth sense, capable of splitting the atom, but it has cornered a monopoly over the traditional five, so I open the pores of my senses to what’s happening.
My backyard on the edge of the woods has come alive with squirrels scampering across the field, pines glowing burnt orange in the moisture and the swelling stream transporting mallard ducks, silt, minnows and pike from vast regions across the valleys and dells, recharging groundwater, picking up momentum all the way into the pond in the woods to give the mallards a feathery thrill, struggling through a beaver dam and finally, as always, dumping its find- ings and gifts into the vast lake. The stream of consciousness in nature is a stream.
I sit on the bridge and let its waters cleanse me.
The ground is musty, but soon will have the fragrance of daffodils and fresh-mown hay. Blades of grass inhale their first breath, a chipmunk somersaults in the morning dew and a hundred mini-insects whirl above my head in circus rhythm until I feel like my mother when I took her to get her hearing aid and she proclaimed, “My world is back!”
Yes, welcome to the slow, unforced world of spring. For some reason, when I’m warm and relaxed outdoors, it’s easier to sweat the splendid small stuff and my metabolism sighs. I stop and watch every twitch of a white-tailed deer as she tries to remain motionless in the brush. When she realizes I’m not acting particularly human, she won’t fear.
Nature can bloom everything, in- cluding us. We are sophisticated animals who respond richly to the outdoors — if we put down our ambition and our cellphones. Perhaps, with the world blossoming all around us, this is the time to renew ourselves, our motivations, our commitment to others.
Spring revives my writing career; I’m inspired to describe the nest up there in the elm tree, a penthouse of 200 twigs and fluttering feathers.
By high noon, the fog that had kissed me soft and silvery at dawn is burning off, as though someone fired a cannon from the forest. I look up, and there she is, the most precious gold on earth — Mother Sun. Snow birds, I would curse you for missing our cynical winter if you hadn’t brought the god of the heavens back for us, and suddenly we feel as though we are on vacation.
When the sun makes her entrance, you think she will never leave. She bequeaths everything life, holds up every precious new leaf, budding flower and grasshopper to make them special. She caresses my cheeks with warmth and makes me shine.
When the sun goes to bed tonight, I’ll rest my head to the chorus of frogs and crickets from the wild, wet fields I knew as a boy under the big porch light of the moon. Michael Clarkson is an author of nonfiction books and a professional speaker with the National Speakers Bureau on the subjects of stress and coping with change.