Melting

Temperatures here are slowly rising. The highs for the day now reach the upper thirties. The big hill is sanded and all across the ridge the snow is beginning to melt. The shady areas are the only large expanses of it left. Everywhere else the sun has threaded through creating a vast white spider web across the fallen leaves and grasses. The fading pristine look is reminiscent of a blank journal page where the first impressions of songbirds and early risers make delicate careful notations. As the days pass the newness wears off and the entries increasingly become the careless scribbling made by the footprints of people and cars.

An untouched landscape, like a fresh start for us, carries within it so much hopefulness. On many levels it mirrors the transit of living. Whether it is the life stretching out before a young baby, a new job or relationship, a retirement to a new lifestyle or even the arrival of another morning, they all awaken feelings of potential and possibility in us. What we find most difficult is living through those parts of our lives that now resemble the melting snow. Waiting for the sun to finish its work is not easy. We get a good look at the mess we might have made. It's inevitable. You cannot live a life and leave behind an untouched snowfall. At that point it is helpful to remember the blessing of melting snow. It's messy work too but the process itself is also hopeful. Our lives are meant to shift and change and recreate themselves in subtle and profound ways. Beautiful events in our lives, like the fresh snow, nourish and restore us to face the work of clean up in the aftermath of downed limbs, skidded out cars and frozen pipes. It is a reminder of the enormous importance of process and renewal. The way it is today is not the way it will always be. How we live our lives now is not how we have to, tomorrow. It makes looking at those muddy ruts in the road filled with dirty ice shards, a whole lot easier-- as does the forecast for snow flurries on Thursday.

And now the iron rinds over

the ponds start dissolving,

you come dreaming of ferns and flowers

and new leaves unfolding,

upon the brash

turnip-hearted skunk cabbage

slinging its bunched leaves up

through the chilly mud.

You kneel beside it. The smell

is lurid and flows out in the most

unabashed way, attracting

into itself a continual spattering

of protein. Appalling its rough

green caves, and the thought

of the thick root nested below, stubborn

and powerful as instinct!

But these are the woods you love,

where the secret name

of every death is life again—a miracle

wrought surely not of mere turning

but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not

tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn

pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.

Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle

refinements, elegant and easeful, wait

to rise and flourish.

What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

Mary Oliver, "Skunk Cabbage", from New and Selected Poems