Welcoming Spring

Chickadees make their two-note call more often in spring. So much so that even in the midst of a cold winter, when I hear that dee-do, the milder days of March come to mind. The smell of snow melting. Warm breezes. The first colourful heads of flowers that poke up in places even while patches of snow remain in cool places.

At the moment, grosbeaks are chattering away in and around the bird feeder. The males are garish yellow, with bold black and white wings, and a distinct bandit mask. I find the female grosbeak a pleasing contrast in soft yellow-gray with subtler markings that camouflage them in the trees. A group of grosbeaks in the feeder look like old friends who haven’t seen each other in a while. It’s the way they chomp the black oil sunflower seeds with their short beaks like mouths frantically sharing gossip or endearments. More like gossip though. They eat in a distracted way, always on the look-out, with fear of getting caught. Friends rather lean toward each other in the intimacy of shared history.

I’m overwhelmingly grateful for that these days, the gentle intimacy of friendship. I realize now that I was hibernating in January and February (and I really appreciated the posts on social media about the tendency to hibernate being natural and okay). Then, like a bear out of her den, I began searching for nourishment. Reaching out to friends. Arranging a group art exhibition for next march — it is a great joy to reconnect with artist friends! Facilitating another mindfulness meditation course. Getting out a little more for lunch or tea. Visit a friend or have a friend over.

Now, part of this is the natural movement of a cancer diagnosis. How, if one is very blessed, friends and family rally around in support. I am very blessed. And what a convergence of blessings. Waking from hibernation to spring, friendship, and creativity. I count the challenges as blessings, too. When I was a cyclist, I enjoyed hill-climbing. I could push into the pedal downstroke, while at the same time pulling up with the opposite upstroke, and also engage the core and upper body using the handlebars. It was a powerful feeling. And usually followed by a gleeful free-ride downhill. My dad often attributed my ability to do such things to stubbornness. (He recalls, for example, how I stamped my foot down once when I was thirteen in refusal to continue competitive swimming.) Stubbornness has seen me up many a hill on my bike, through many of the challenges with MS, and it will see me through cancer treatment.

Though now it feels more like grace. Grace has a little more yield to it. More wisdom. Acquiescence to the larger movement of life. Less ego-driven accomplishment and more unfolding. Christianity and Buddhism share grace in their emphasis on the emptying out of sticky clingy-ness to the ways we can (even inadvertently) cause harm to ourselves and others. Transcending these things or letting them go, we thereby open to something larger than ourselves. I’ve grown fond of the word grace in all it’s connotations. The graceful movement of a dancer, the the soaring of a bird, the opening of a flower. Youth has a certain innocent grace. The agility of an athlete. The precision of a skilled tradesperson detailing a house or crafting an instrument. Beauty, nature, art, poetry. Debates, conversation, and oratory when conducted with mutual respect and within in a larger context are like a graceful dance. Grace is never manipulative or self-interested. It is kindness in a pressure cooker, calm in a storm, generosity in poverty. In Buddhism, an act of kindness in a “hell realm” has far more merit that an act of kindness in fortuitous circumstances. Sometimes the storm is grace itself — that which does the emptying.

Just now, beyond the bird feeder, I admired the simple and pleasing way a tree branch traced the shape of the clouds beyond. Clouds and trees are examples of fractals, a scientific concept describing repetitive self-similar behaviour in nature. Example: the structure of veins in a tree leaf are repeated in the branch structure of the whole tree. As in bird feathers and snowflakes, the human veinous system and river estuaries, cancer cells and galaxies, these things have patterns that repeat proportionally as they are scaled up or down in size. Fractals are simple and can also be endlessly complex. They result from the relentless inevitability of change. Uphill, downhill. Maybe grace is finding simplicity in the complexity.

(Fractals also have something to do with zero. Fascinating! But that’s for a later blog.)

I’ll finish off with a poem I dictated into my phone last spring as I sat somewhere along the trail with Rios. (And the crafting of which has delayed this blog!) It was one of those larger moments; a kind of grace. I felt like a fish in the sea and not at all thirsty.

Yet bare, branches fill with sky and air.

Before a new canopy shelters the forest, 
its floor is variegated mermaid green: 

spotted trout lilies hover around 
as though this were all water 
and swimming fish search
in the light dazzled pockets
among poplar, hazel, and birch. 

Spring’s sheer potency is like water
where familiar surprises arrive:

yellow bells flower and wave
over last year’s silver decay, tossed
by candy-striped white blossoms, where
shiny solomon’s seals poke up their heads
and dutchmen dance in white breeches.

Here where emptiness teaches
this mirrors the mystery:

spring, this body, moving
like a school of little fish
are waving
the sea.

~

In May, my dear teachers are offering a retreat I highly recommend: Elemental Truth. Mala and Terry are truly skilled teachers and offer such rich explorations of the five elements (earth, water, fire, wind, space). This is grounded in Buddhist meditation practice and in the beautiful natural surroundings of The Dharma Centre of Canada, Kinmount, Ontario. I can’t get there these days, but it would bring great joy to my heart for those of you who could!