Freshly tilled

Yesterday came the first real Spring rain, and with it the first intoxicating scent of growing and living. The sun rose today in delightful mysteriousness, invoking the wonder of a Creation we cannot fully comprehend. Walking home tonight, dirt still rattling inside my shoes, I heard the first sounding of peeping frogs, away down in the distant wooded valley.

We moved earth today; in fertile carpets it peeled away from root and stone, in churning, foaming waves it piled softly as cream into new fields. I took pauses to visit animals, accepted affection, and played feet-first in cool, clearing dirt. Hard work makes me happy. This sort of work, outside, real, where progress can be witnessed and the solitude is accompanied by a gentle hum of growing. Many pitfalls and trappings fall away delightfully, as if they were waiting to be forgotten, and the self is lost against the great rumbling roar of a patient Mother Earth, teaming with gifts. Sun and Moon make things easier for me, Earth rejuvenates, green remembers to me with unfailing constancy the natural strength I possess.

I'm happiest when I feel like I belong, when I feel quiet and solitary yet not alone, when I have good and helpful things to do. It seems simple enough, a recipe even for nearly any human being. It's the living that's the hard part. Living it day in and day out, living it in spite of hardship, bruised emotions, unexpected circumstances and perceptions gone wrong. Living and allowing myself to be flawed, for others to be imperfect, too. Allowing myself to imagine a better future, a better world, without building Towers of Babel from thickly mortared emotive fantasy. The energy of life is nearly breath-taking. Strong enough to spin me out of control, quiet and patient enough to leave me languishing in helpless sadness if I choose not to look up in time to see it disappear. I feel sometimes like a little ship at Sea, tossed here and there, now sailing briskly with the wind, now becalmed and breathless. Except I'm only at the mercy of my own volition, thoughts and deeds, not a pitiless Ocean. Though I be sad, I'm willing to see it through, willing to play my part in moulding a better person out of this raw material, this empty tousled garden bed.