Before you returned, the waters were frozen, the ground deep with snow. No songbirds fluttered through the stiff, cold branches of the trees. Everything slept in darkness.
Oh, the world still held its beauty in a stark and subdued way. But nothing foretold an awakening; nothing hinted at renewal. Hope was a forgotten word.
Then, in you came, with your warmth and your gold,your earth-shaking thunder and life-giving rain, coaxing everything to awake, pushing it to rise, luring it into the light, inviting it to open, giving it reason to sing, to shiver with joy, to remember that love never dies.
Clouds, darker than those that already veiled the morning sky, drifted in just before noon, and the world stilled. After a while a soft rain fell, washing the trees’ swelling buds, and the twigs and branches and limbs and trunks, and finally the new grass and the mosses and tiny spring flowers. It stopped about three and I watched the sun emerge, pale through the clouds, but giving its light to the sky behind them. Once, long ago, someone who lived for some time in a woods, where he no doubt learned the spirits of the trees, looked about him and asked, “Have you noticed how the light is always perfect?”
The Yes, whose merest spark of thought creates vast worlds within worlds, whose living laughter flows endlessly between and around and within them, whose joy knows no bounds, whose forces flow in our blood, whose light sings in our souls— that Yes—plays here, right in the midst of this moment in Spring, and its star children dance to the song.
When your time in the sunshine is measured in days you have to make the most of every shred of them. Hold nothing back. Release all hesitation. Give it your best. Give it your all. Beam out your light. Trumpet your joy. Do you know? Can I tell you? How you fill our hearts with gladness with your song!
It’s not that the first ones are especially daring or brave. It’s the song of the light that calls them, the notes so sublime they can neither be resisted or denied. “Come: Here is wonder. Here is beauty. Here is the destiny designed for your joy. Come: drink the dew. Hear the birdsong. Feel the rain; drink the fresh morning air. Show the way. Paint the world with your colors. Open your petals to the sun. Join the grand chorus of the exuberant, burgeoning Yes.” And so they push past the last layer of darkness and find the light. And slowly they unfurl themselves, amazed, and filled with gladness. And they pick up the song, and sing to their sleeping fellows, “Oh, come! Come and see! Come and dance with us In the Yes of the sun!”
A week passed before I visited the eastern slope of the southern hill again. The buds of the quince are giving way to tiny green leaves. The baby ferns are still asleep beneath the soil. But look! The daffodils are open! Little patches of them dance all across the hillside, glistening with droplets from the morning’s rain. Where, I suddenly wonder, is that one who came first? And turning toward the mother spruce, I see her, ruffled petals spread wide, beaming happiness for all she’s worth. And what she’s worth, it’s plain to see, is well beyond any measure. I kneel and smooth a fingertip across her fragile petals and we both melt in a connection of sheer joy.
One of my favorite things about owning shelves and stacks of books is that every now and then I’m inspired to shuffle them around. I find the most marvelous things that way. Take today for instance. I stumbled across Kenneth Patchen’s Hallelujah Anyway: A Book of Picture-Poems. My copy is a paperback, a bit tattered and worn. It’s been traveling with me since I bought it new in 1966, the year it was published. It was the title that got me. Hallelujah Anyway. Even way back then, that somehow said it all.
The drawings in it are childlike and the poems are painted across them freehand. But there’s nothing childlike about Patchen’s poems. If life hadn’t kicked him around some, he couldn’t have written this one – one of my favorites: “The world’s not enough really for the kind of rent we have to pay to live in us.” That’s it, the whole thing scrawled across the page.
It tastes bitter at first bite. But sometimes when its words happen into my mind I hear them as an expression of dark humor. Sometimes you have to laugh or you’ll cry. It can get that painful and absurd here. And laughter, however contemptuous, is still the best medicine. Dark humor’s better than none.
I believe in laughter. It’s like the crack that lets in the light. In fact, when I see one of life’s storms approaching from the horizon, I often send out an immediate petition for “strength and a sense of humor.”
But there’s more to Patchen’s poem than its attitude. It’s a blatant statement of the basic truth that the world is not enough to compensate for the suffering we endure here, living inside these human-suits with all these other humans and the insane situations that they manage to create. We deserve a lot more than the world offers.
Happily, more is here. Not out there in the world. But here, inside us. It’s the part of us that wants that Something-Greater-than-the-World. Something that would let us feel whole, and content, and at peace. Something that would let us love ourselves, warts and all, and give us eyes that would see everyone else as deserving of love as well. And its inside every one of us.
It’s not always an easy part of ourselves to find. We have to learn to listen, to recognize its nudge. Life, with all its complications, gets awfully distracting. But the wanting is always there. And it calls to us and says “keep looking.”
Patchen’s poem tells us not to waste time looking for it in the world. The best we’ll find there, and then only if we’re lucky, are teachers and random clues. But life’s genuine rewards – recognition of beauty, and goodness, and truth – come from the core of life within us. And when we find them, they bring such light that all we can do, despite the world’s pain, is shout out loud, “Hallelujah Anyway.”
I wake to a single whispered word: April. I breathe, slowly inhaling the morning air. wanting to savor its every molecule. I hold it in my mouth for one still moment, the word pulsing through me: April. Then I exhale and rise to bright sunlight and a robin’s egg sky. Golden trees, lacy now with fat spring buds, sway on the western hill. I pour coffee. The neighboring birds arrive, eager for their breakfast, the little ones chirping their greetings. Beside the kitchen door last night’s raindrops sparkle from the leaves of the baby bleeding hearts, the whole spray looking like a splendid work of art. I stand admiring it , wrapped in a cloud of birdsong, when I hear a whisper, soft as a breeze: April.
I got to see another March, the birth of another springtime, the beginning of this year’s parade of the flowers with their songs of promises fulfilled, prayers answered, praises sung, despite all that opposed them. And here stand the wild daffodils, ruffled sunshine, gently dancing their thanks and farewells. My heart chants with them: Thank you, March. Thank you, March. Thank you, March. Farewell.
