We sit on the edge of a chair ready to jump up at the first signs that Spring is near, that avenue that brings us home to renew life, give us Easter and take our hats and coats at the door. Welcome everyone to a short introduction to a flower in this episode, a poetic attempt to wrap you my friends in what is ahead on our earth. Put away your doldrums for a walk with me through a magical forest where you can rest and lay it all down…
Open! Open! Be Open! A few yards on the edge of the forest growth, a crocus heaved out of the soil and blinked. For a few days as a Spring snow fell, it glimmered through a canopy of stick saplings and fallen leaves, a lone beacon above the sepias and brindled wood. Just a week before, it belayed its portion of life upward, some each hour, until its green blades thrust into the frail air for the first time. Hundreds of those awakening tubers lay hidden in the forest beds – like explosive mines triggered to erupt. Freezing and thawing and freezing and thawing in the humus, they wait for the Watchtower of Time to open the earth’s door and see what the world had to offer.
I stooped down to see if the cerulean flower was real or a crinkled candy wrapper, but my careless footstep strayed too near and its bell sloped away and drooped over. It will straighten out again, I thought, but it was not to be, not under my solid footprint. Instead, the bulb must wait an the Angel of Patience before rising above the forest floor again.
These exchanges, the ones I have with Mother and her nature, between a petalled flower and my own blues, require delicacy and time. There is no place for harsh and heavy footsteps. Indeed, it had only taken one careless move to flatten a new flower that was innocently checking out its new digs for the first time. It was just getting to know this earthy brown, and looking forward to the blueprint it would have on the landscape. On the edge where crocuses reached for sunlight, in the brown ground, five one day then five more and five the next, their oval shapes remind me that each is precious in the Woods of Discovery.
Standing to the side of me is the silent hologram of a Hiker who travelled all night just to watch the same flower pop up. At a loss for words, his figure flickers on… and off and on…and off as life ebbs from the indigo crocus, and he turns and walks away to tend to another fallen flower.
This woodland opening is congested with menacing, prickly globes, preparing to stick their prongs into my coat and not give up any ground. They became stubborn and bitter and jab at my intrusion. I have been one of those thistles and did the same once or twice to a passerby when all that person wanted was to bend down low and peer inside a crocus petal and glimpse the Woods of Breakthrough. Today, I am the thistle who had good intentions, but instead became brash and selfish and thought the enchanting trail was reserved just for me. I thought the woods was my Woods of Breakthrough and no one else’s. Now, I’m left alone with thistles and barbs and waiting again for the brown ground to become a field of blooms.
Hope! Did I forget that hope always works just under the surface of a cold soil. This bulb will rise again when the Hiker comes back, like He always does, with his cane reaching out to tap me gently. He will hover lightly over the underground, reach out and free the burdens that bind us all down, teach us how to forgive ourselves, and the flower we thought would never talk to us again. It will and it will open and flourish and welcome the showers of friendly rays and rain showers. We, it, they, us will burst forward from brokenness to speak to God every morning and be ok with falling asleep in His arms every night. That will be and will be the bedtime story we will tell the little ones.
While I wait, every noise from this Surrender Forest assembles tones down and tunes up. I can hear them warming up for the symphony through the pines. A lone oboe holds its note, a long low note and I remember how solid something very, very small can be. Truth, like the sound of a flower, comes out of its hiding place and says to me, “Watch as you step. You are not out of the woods yet, but you cannot go back the way you came either.”
Many times, I have awaited the view around the next curve. Over there, behind the giant sycamore whose bark is smooth and more patterned as it goes up. Above that, where an arena of grace opens, I see a silently circling red-tailed hawk. It seems to be falling asleep up there in the clouds, spiraling ‘round and ‘round and ‘round until it becomes only a dot in the sky. The hemlocks and cedars wave goodbye as a final condolence, sending their needles down to soften the Surrender Forest of heavy eyelids.
I can say I’m sorry again for mistakes I’ve made and hope my sorrow will also fall to rest as seasons sweeps around our blue Earth and come back to visit the blue crocus. I stand in the company of Auburn and Copper and Russet and feel the calm of the paper-thin blanket of the late snow falling, the later snow that fell, and the latest of all snows that is still falling as if it were preparing a picnic spread. I am invited to sit with friends who will eat and laugh away the hours until we are all covered in white snowflakes. They tell me that tomorrow will begin well again, and taller than the Brambles of the Past. There is another crocus, a tiny blue oboe beginning to hold its reassuring note and we can hear it holding its own in the company of something bigger, growing bigger and bigger than the promising, wide blue yonder of sky.