Go GREEN

The last day of March. We’re setting a record here. The first time in 132 years that we haven’t had snow in Minnesota in March. I still hang on to the idea that there must be one more snow, if not snowstorm. Donny does too. This was too easy. An Easter week that blesses all of us who didn’t go out of town for spring break. 70 degree afternoons. Not even any mud right now. Rain predicted and yahoo! Ten minutes of rain, and the dry, early-green will pop and be verdant in that way that will hurt your eyes and just about make you cry for joy.

I remember this one year when I traveled south in early spring when all was still a mess here: leftover snow and bare trees. The landscape had gotten stripped of color and everything was looking dirty. When we got to Kentucky and started to see green it was like balm – not a jump up and down joy – but a relieving joy, a grateful joy, a "soaking it in with starving eyes" joy.

We’ve got this beautiful conservatory in St. Paul at Como Park. When the winter gets too long and you can’t take a trip, you go there to feast your eyes. Your nose doesn’t mind either. Rows of garden-like flowers set around pools under a dome, humidity high, lavender and pink and yellow and blue and GREEN and spicey-sweet frangrance. Then you walk to the next room and it is jungle-like beauty and there is moss and ferns and more GREEN almost, than you can bear.

Most mornings lately, I can’t start the day the way I’d like. One thing or another lingers that I “don’t know what to do about” and I feel I’m starving for movement. With the sun falling across the greening grass, such uncertainty coupled with purposefulness feels like more nonsense than it does at any other time. Who cares!

Who cares! You calm down. You start believing that everything comes to you in the right time.

I’d like to say that’s the end of the story but I’m not sure it is. There’s something in that “starving” feeling. There’s something in that I “don’t know what to do about it” feeling that is like a starvation diet where you’re not getting what you need. You feel as if you’re withering away, losing yourself to things undone or matters unresolved, and so the need is there to take small steps…but which ones?

In the lonesome-feeling monochromatic days of the end of winter/beginning of spring, there’s something that makes you go find the beauty your eyes crave. You’ve had enough drab. Your whole system needs an infusion of color. You feel like you’ve been in an Army barracks and surrounded by cement and olive green too long. Or simply in the house with a dog, two cats and two birds and that certain indoor smell that’s not fully relieved until you can throw the windows and doors open and get a cross breeze that refreshes the whole place. You need a CHANGE and you need it bad. You need to walk where the ground is padded beneath your feet, or where the flooring is slate and put together like puzzle pieces of white and pink and gray like it is at the Como Conservatory.

Maybe you can’t rush the change to spring but you’ve got to do something for yourself. Got to feed your soul as well as your eyes. Got to get a feeling of movement going if only just because you know you need it. It’s not that it makes any sense to fret about it, I’m just saying that there’s legitimacy in the feeling.

You let yourself admit your anxiousness for things like the coming of spring, but sometimes don’t admit to yourself those other matters that are also cravings of the soul. You want to say pshaw...let it go...it will come when the time is right.

But there are times when you know you need to do something and, even if you don't know what, you know that action is part of the craving. You need to get yourself where it's GREEN. Get on a green branch (as my friend Mary says). Get going. Get on with things. And it helps to admit it.