Another grey day. As if the sky has melted the clouds and become an ashen soup of slush and grit. The crystal flakes that drift about beyond the window have lost their glitter, the magic of the holidays buried beneath the leaden weight of frozen snow. It always seems that Winter becomes a petulant child this time of year, vacillating between tantrums and exhaustion, dragging his feet and clutching at the world with claws of fractured ice.
I dream of spring. I hear delicious whispers of warmth in the night and wake grumpily to the same arctic world I kissed goodnight the eve before. I want to nap. I want to sulk. I want to move south. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in a climate without the radical seasonal changes of Pennsylvania. The pale green of spring that gives way to the lushness of summer that burns itself out in a rush of copper and ruby and gold before the ivory silence falls. The calendar flips, the clock ticks, and if you endure....hold your breath and pace and wait...another season is just weeks away. Trust me.
And such is life, really, isn't it? Some seasons gloriously grand....some barren. There are islands of paradise and deserts hellishly dry; monsoons and hurricanes and floods that threaten to drown. Fields of topaz that stretch as far as you can see. Days of darkness, days of bliss.
Sometimes you can anticipate the season ahead. Sometimes it slams you to the ground with enough force to crack your bones and knock the air from your lungs. Seasons of love, of despair, of passion or pain. Seasons of stagnation and ones of spectacular bloom. Some cause permanent scaring, some heal. Some strip you naked and bare.
Some teach you to fly.
2013 was one of the most difficult years of my life. There are more lines around my eyes now, more shadows in the periphery.
But it's nearly spring....can you feel it? As if the earth is stirring, the ground thirsty, poised on the brink of something new. I'm here, crossing my fingers, holding my breath, and hoping....
Here's to a new season, my friends. May yours be lovely indeed.
Hope is the dream of a soul awake.
French proverb
