pull up a chair

they say it’s spring out there. celestial lines were crossed in the wee, wee hours of yesterday, and, for a flash there, light and shadow fell in equal measure. 

i don’t feel the light though. not in sync with springtime’s beckoning. i’m inclined still to hunker down in winter’s shadow. 

for reasons i can’t quite fathom, i’m not ready this time ’round for the seasonal advance. i still feel wintry in my bones. the light change is too abrupt for me, too ice-white for me. my inner metronome is far too slow for the prestissimo that’s rising. i don’t mind the cardinal’s vernal song, though, rung out from treetops high, and piercing through still-frigid air. but i’m not seasonally adjusted. i’m lagging at least two lopes behind. 

i can’t tell if it’s that my winter felt circumvented. or that i’m wishing for all of time to freeze in place. since the world is rather dire these days, that cannot be a wise solution. in that regard, i’ll take time in double measure. may we all wake up on the morning of eight november, 2028, with a whole new glimmer in our eyes. and the present firmly in the past.

i’m feeling somewhat stuck. hardly welcoming of burgeoning to come. and that’s a most peculiar state for me. 

might the whole universe be toppled on its head, upside down and inside out? 

the one sure sign that spring is here is that when i awoke, just hours after equinox, the world i saw was dumped with snow. which in these parts is something of a rite of spring. tulips rise, and snowflakes fall. my mother swears she knows it’s spring when she slides on her winter boots and brushes all the glops of snow off her daffydills. 

no wonder we of the four-quarter year take spring in slow, uncertain sips. there is no fine delineation, as if the calendar and earth set their clocks in synchronous coordination. 

on a day when snows fell in glops, and then proceeded to melt in same-sized gloppings, and on the day when headlines kept insisting the springtime was upon us, i heard a thump at my door, and therein found prescriptive for my seasonal laggings. 

there, in a plain brown box, lay a book i’d been awaiting. my friend chelsea steinauer-scudder, as intelligent and beautiful a writer as could be, became a mother back when she and i were reading books and writing in the zoom rooms that covid carved. i’d first read chelsea in the pages of emergence magazine, a wunder site (online and print magazine, as well as creative production studio) that probes the depths of ecology, culture, and spirituality, and where she was a writer and editor for five years. when i saw she’d be leading reading circles (braiding sweetgrass, among them) and ones for the craft of nature writing, i signed up, and cemented myself to what would otherwise have been a front-row seat. 

chelsea grew up on the great plains of oklahoma and the sandhills prairie of nebraska, where for a time her papa researched bison, fire, and native plant communities, so she comes to her native landscape––language enfolding the sanctity of earth––with what seems an effortless fluency, as if she grew up breathing it. which, of course, she did. and then she went on to harvard divinity school, where she earned a masters in theological studies, and ever since she’s been writing sumptuously, focusing her work, in her words, “on the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred.”  

her first book, Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling (Broadleaf Books), is what brought the thud to my front stoop. it’s due out april 8, but my copy landed yesterday. and it might be the cure i needed to lull me into spring. 

a.) it gives me excuse to curl under a blanket for a day or two, and b.) here’s what i’m about to bathe in, passages such as this:

“I wish to invite you into a kind of mothering that is wild and porous. The kind that draws blood, that loves and fears, rejoices and doubts, that exposes where we are most deeply vulnerable and from there stretches us into what is beyond us. I mean the kind of mothering that works within uncertainty and mystery. The kind that leaves soil beneath our fingernails and seeds in our hair.” 

she writes about mothering and being mothered by places. ecological mothering. she defines ecological motherhood as: a shared, place-based responsibility to nurture and support human and more-than-human life. she writes of the karmic cycle of rebirth, a subject aptly plucked from the vernal syllabus. she writes of the silent flight of barn owls, of nursing and endangered right whales, of real and imagined forests, eroding salt marshes, and newly planted gardens. 

she writes that the protagonists of these stories have been teaching her facets of mothering (a verb that she, like me, insists is not tied to gender nor obstetrics). those facets belong to us all, no matter our life’s work: “language, belonging, entanglement, community, edge work, homemaking, and how to think about the future.”

my friend chelsea just might nudge me over my springtime bump, and land me softly on the vernal side….

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as i await the vernal skip in my own heart, i scan the literary landscape for those others who, along with chelsea, might nudge me there. and no surprise, i turn to two favorites, the great naturalist and writer, aldo leopold, and the poet mary oliver, who drew the sacred from her every path and passage.

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”

aldo leopold

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North Country

In the north country now it is spring and there
     is a certain celebration. The thrush
has come home. He is shy and likes the 
     evening best, also the hour just before
morning; in that blue and gritty light he
     climbs to his branch, or smoothly
sails there. It is okay to know only
     one song if it is this one. Hear it
rise and fall; the very elements of your soul
     shiver nicely. What would spring be
without it? Mostly frogs. But don’t worry, he

arrives, year after year, humble and obedient
     and gorgeous. You listen and you know
you could live a better life than you do, be
     softer, kinder. And maybe this year you will
be able to do it. Hear how his voice
     rises and falls. There is no way to be
sufficiently grateful for the gifts we are
     given, no way to speak the Lord’s name
often enough, though we do try, and

especially now, as that dappled breast
     breathes in the pines and heaven’s
windows in the north country, now spring has come,
     are opened wide.

––Mary Oliver

are you finding yourself in springlike mode, and what sights and sounds and scents are stirring you there?