a second spring

I hear frogs and the barn swallows which arrived today, searching for the nest they abandoned last fall as they escaped for warmer weather.  And I seem to hear the sky, the wide open stretch of blue-to-pale-green to a blush of rose where the sun is setting in the north-east.  It’s what I don’t hear that is also allowing me to breathe deeply.  I hear no sirens, no skytrains, no screeching of tires.  I hear no horns, no dogs.  Just frogs, the swallows and the skies.  And my own breathing. 

This is where grace doesn’t just seep in; it somehow flows up and out.  I feel it within, rising up, and then all at once coming from without, reaching to very marrow and sinew.  We just witnessed spring, the way it sprung up with the surprise of colour, and now we see it again, in another part of the world: an echo of the first spring.  

Still, the frogs.  The miracle of their sound so soon after the thaw erased the deep cold that blanketed this surface, the pond that was so recently just ice.  How is it that these creatures appear again, making this slough a fertile home, filling the night air with their joy? 

And then there are the sketches in my mother’s den: the one with a woman who cradles her newborn, so clearly newborn the way it is still curled up in one arm while her other hand carefully pushes back a strand of hair.  And she looks down while the child drinks.  How is it that after such a short time the babe has made itself a home in her shadow?  The womb that was wintered over, the breasts that were dry, now the fertile resting place.

And I sit.  Resting.  Breathing deep Sabbath breaths on this eve of Sunday when we are so often scurrying with details for the next morning.  Details, details, details which sometimes, somehow delete, delete, delete joy that could be had. 

And now this time to be reminded, to remember.  He is doing a new thing.  We see it, hear, smell it, breathe and remember. 

And we testify: He will do a new thing with this familiar, fallow territory and make it fertile again too.   And we testify that he will do this in every territory, the one marked by sky-trains and screeching tires too, and provide a descant for those sounds with the dearest reminders of newness, with the signs of spring everywhere.