Happy spring, everyone! I know spring officially arrived a few weeks ago, but I hadn’t quite gotten there myself until a few days ago. The transition from winter to spring has been more on the winter side this year, it seems—cold days more than warm ones, a certain reluctance in the thawing process. There has been something this year in the transition that seems to have been especially resistant to what is emerging. But trees in bloom and the blessing of some warm days have made what is emerging harder and harder to miss.
And I wonder if part of the slow arrival of spring this year has also been a matter of the spirit. How it is, we are all coping with the state of the world in these times when there is so much that would trouble. So much that could lead us to that place of despair. What is it that we need to find our way into a new season? What is it that each of us needs as part of this season of rebirth? Where is it that we find those indicators of hope we need so much?
The earth has a way of offering us the lessons we need. There is much around us that would open us up to what is possible. But we also need to get there ourselves. We can’t get to spring until we are ready to get there. In that spirit, let me offer one of my favorite poems. May we each find our own way to blessing and to rebirth in this season.
This is a poem by Galway Kinnell, “Saint Francis and the Sow”
The bud
Galway Kinnell, from Selected Poems (2001)
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
Blessings,
Tom
Rev. Thomas Disrud (he/him), Associate Minister