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.

Melting

I’m beginning to feel that feeling of having too much on my mind, too many areas of focus, too much involvement in too many things. My feelings have been hurt by someone other than my daughter in recent days. It’s a sure sign of overload. I need some time and space.

Luckily, it’s almost cabin time. I went out to visit her yesterday but only stayed a minute. It was a combination, I suppose, of cold, and things to do, but it wasn’t that cold and there wasn’t that much to do.

Still, at this time of the year, when it’s just topping 40 degrees, there’s a need to prepare the cabin and yourself for cabin time. It’s way too chill to go out in the morning. But if the weather holds, I can tromp through the snow with my heaters early Saturday morning, and spend a few hours there in the afternoon. My soul yearns for cabin time.

The change in the landscape since I wrote last has been enormous…inner and outer.

The snow is melting. I was on the freeway for the first time in a while the other day, and the banks to either side are free of snow. I don’t know if this is due to the steep slope of the hills going down to the freeway trench, or if the major highways have the majority of snow removed all along, but it was startling. There it was – the dirty looking signs of spring. And under the tires the potholes, and in the paper, even on the front page, the beginning of the pothole discussions that will go on until the snow falls again, complete with diagrams that show the anatomy of the hole. I meant to read it but never did get around to it. That’s the way things have gone lately.

This morning there was a hawk perched over the yard, and the attendant crows, but the hawk’s gone now and I didn’t see him leave. That’s the way things have gone lately.

The icicles have melted, the parking lots are almost free of their dangerous patches of dirty ice, the birds are singing, and when the sun shines, people are out in force, walking their dogs or their kids, but I haven’t been out for a walk. I spent last weekend doing taxes. It’s a sure sign of spring, and a sure sign that this coming weekend, I need cabin time.

I’m a little down. I get this way from time to time. There doesn’t have to be a reason, but there usually is, and I usually look for it, and it rarely has little to do with anything other than the feeling of needing time and space. This time there’s the extra component of having given a talk and the doldrums that come after. That is done. I try to move right on to the next big thing on the horizon, but the energy isn’t there….

So I’ll get my cabin time this weekend, and maybe shake off the winter doldrums, and feel the heat of the sun falling through the window onto my face, and remember that the landscape doesn’t change in a flash. There’s a slow melting. While it happens, there’s a refreshing that goes on, but also a few potholes.