Winter and Spring

Winter is leaving...Spring just announced its entry last week, on March 20th: date of the Spring equinox in which the day and the night are equally long. From now on, the day will be longer...more daylight hours...less - brrrrr! - cold. A transition.

One more transition. Trees are starting to 'come up'; bulbs are sprouting, perforating the layers of soil that covered them all these months while they...slept? The Bradford Pear trees are blooming...and their sprouts' unusual smell pervades the area, dispersed around by the cool breeze blowing in from the north, or the northwest.

And the idea of renewal is in the air, everywhere. Yet, what renews has to 'die' first. Father Ed was saying yesterday (his 'groupies' met, called by dear Mathew, to celebrate watching a DVD of his sermon of 14 years (?) ago on "letting go". But letting go is a practice of death and dying. Little bits...at a time. Little moments of surrender. Inexplicable, yet comforting.

And then, who also comes along? No one else but Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. And he writes:

"When the signs of age begin marking my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old;...in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is You (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within Yourself." The Sun Magazine, SunbeamsApril 2010

Am I...the soil...the sprout...???

Thanks Father Ed, Father Pierre...it's not that simple!