Seeds of Spring

These past few weeks have been symphonies of cherry blossoms. Blushing interludes and rouged overtures, their vibrant pink notes sang across the streets and were held on the breath of every neighbourhood. Now as the verdant green of new born leaves share the stage with the fading petals, the blossoms are preparing to migrate east where warmer days are still but unkempt dreams.

I adore this time of year, when the mask of winter has melted and spring shares its waxing light and banquet of colour. The canvas of the landscape seems to change each day as something new arises from the dark ground and something else fades and returns to the same moist earth. All in this temporal world is impermanent, transitioning from birth to death, moving in a life rhythm where cadence and pauses are as natural as the sun's daily sweep across the sky.

Perhaps it's spring's exuberance, its yawning and stretching into existence that adds to the quickening of this time of year.Where winter felt as the hours were frozen in solace, spring tugs us into the awakening light and seems to set the world on fast forward with an intensity that glimmers on rapture and holy rewards.

Is it any wonder that poets and their words seem to court this season like no other? Be it Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Lawrence, Lorca, or Oliver, the senses come alive with fertile imaginings and fitful bursts of muse inspired hope.

This poem by David Whyte speaks so keenly to the dawning of this season and of us all. Read it aloud and, even better, read it to another. Perhaps to the fading cherry blossoms pressing themselves against the clear blue sky. 

THE SONG OF THE LARK

by David Whyte

The song begins and the eyes are lifted 

but the sickle points toward the ground,

its downward curve forgotten in the song she hears, 

while over the dark wood, rising or falling,

the sun lifts on cool air, the small body of a singing lark.

The song falls, the eyes raise, the mouth opens

and her bare feet on the earth have stopped.

Whoever listens in this silence, as she listens,

will also stand opened, thoughtless, frightened

by the joy she feels, the pathway in the field

branching to a hundred more, no one has explored.

What is called in her rises from the ground

and is found in her body,

what she is given is secret even from her.

This silence is the seed in her

of everything she is

and falling through her body

to the ground from which she comes,

it finds a hidden place to grow

and rises, and flowers, in old wild places,

where the dark-edged sickle cannot go.

from RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems

© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Join David Whyte at Royal Roads University for Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity - an evening talk on Friday, May 2, and for Solace: The Art of Asking More Beautiful Questions on Saturday, May 3. 

Wishing you a wild and wonder-filled spring.

Tess Wixted
Learning Associate

Visit us at cstudies.royalroads.ca.