On the hill, in the rain, wild daffodils bloomed, sending their yellow light into the gray day. I took it as a note of congratulations. It was just two days past Christmas when I began this challenge, to add a piece each day for 100 days to these pages. “It will carry me through the winter, ‘til spring,” I hoped. And so it did. And more than that, it gave purpose to my days and kept me on the lookout for bits of beauty and delight to share, and that kept me afloat, regardless of the world’s cold and dark and sorrow. Always, there is beauty. Always, compensation. I will keep a ready heart and open mind, and write on.
Time, like an endless ribbon, has been unspooling now for nearly 100 days, and I, as luck would have it, rode each one on a highway of swiftly passing stories. And from each day I plucked one tale, and blessing it as best I could, sent it on, with love, to you, as I had challenged myself to do.
Now, look! Your eyes have come upon this one, this one before the hundredth. And as I reach that milestone I tell you that, from here, there appears to be no end.
That bare trees erupt with bursting buds simply because, so they tell us, the planet’s axis has tipped toward the sun, is one wonder. A larger one, it seems to me, is that we can walk past, hardly noticing, if at all. What a world, where miracles occur in such profusion that we barely give them a ho-hum!
When I was walking in the park last week, I happened across a young pine who looked so much like my dear old friend, Little Pine, that for a minute I thought I’d been transported back in time. That’s her, the new one, in the photo below. Today, the universe nudged me toward a file where I found, to my surprise, the original Little Pine story from March of 2010. What better love letter, I thought, could I send you today than to blend these two finds together and send them with a smile.
The little pine grew surrounded by mighty elders whose tops brushed the sky and whose branches were homes for squirrels and birds and bugs of every description. She loved the way the wind made music in their boughs, and showered their red needles at her feet. She loved the sparkling fireflies that came in summer to dance from the ground to the stars above.
But most of all, she loved the quiet nights when the elders would whisper the fantastic tales of The World Beyond that they learned from the visiting birds.
Much of it was beyond the understanding of the little pine, and she had no way of knowing whether the stories were make-believe or real. But they were grand stories either way, and as the seasons passed and her understanding grew, the elders were able to explain what the fables meant, and stories took on great beauty and increasing meaning.
The stories the wrens told differed somewhat from the ones the robins told, and theirs differed from the owls’ version in many details. But one year a great eagle had built its nest in the top-most branches of an elder who dwelt high up the distant slope, and it wove the bits of the birds’ stories into one magnificent piece.
Counsels of elders had studied the eagle’s tale through the ages, and passed it down as clearly as they could to the all the trees in the forest.
Just as each tree was a distinctive expression of life, they said, with its own sap and wood, its unique pattern of bark, needles and branches, all together the pines and their leafy cousins were part of a larger community of life known as a forest. And beyond the forest lay other communities, known as plains and mountains and deserts and seas. And altogether, they made up a whole called a planet, and her cousin was the moon, and her mate the sun.
That was all the eagle knew for certain, from its travels. But it believed, the elders said, that the sun and moon and planet were part of yet another whole that was part of another and so on, forever. And its nature was joy, for the space that bound it all together was made of love so vast and deep and all pervasive, that even the tiniest ant who crawled across the pine’s needles felt its power. And every bit of it mattered and was needed to fully express love’s song.
That, the elders told the young pine, was the importance of being exactly who she was. She was needed for love to express exactly the note of joy that she embodied, and in all of creation, she alone could sing it.
Mimicking nothing, following nothing but its own inner song, trusting that being is its own reward, reaching only toward fulfillment of this moment’s highest possibility, it unfolds in exquisite perfection.
From the west, low peals of thunder announce the coming rain, its scent perfuming the air that wafts across the spring-green fields. At their edges, maples lift red buds skyward like children sticking their tongues out to catch the rain’s first drops as they fall. You can feel the wanting and waiting of it, of its joyous anticipation, and hear it breathe in whispered song, “We’re alive. We’re alive. We’re alive, my dear. It’s spring, and we are alive.”
The Yes, whose merest spark of thought creates whole worlds within worlds, whose living laughter flows endlessly between and around and within them, whose joy knows no bounds, whose life force flows in our blood, whose light illumines our souls— that Yes—is alive here, right in the midst of this moment in Spring.
Okay, little lamb. You did it. Laying there in the new grass, your baby hooves tucked up, your ears poked out, your face wearing that little lamb smile, you stole my heart. My eyes send you pets as warm as this new spring sunshine, and I sing you welcome, little one. Oh, baby! Your sweetness stole heart.
Mere whim sent me down the road that passed the lake I had forgotten, tucked as it is between farms, its smooth complementing their rugged earthy rows, but both rolling, each in its own way. And both will soon wear fresh green. Even now you can feel it rising from somewhere powerful and deep, a green known by fishes and worms and reeds. Come back next week, something whispers inside me, and see what’s happened. You might find yourself amazed.
