Spring, Easter & keeping on

It’s so easy to look at the new growth of spring and think about Easter’s message of resurrection. Everything that’s blooming right now — the trees budding, leaves opening, flowers reaching up through the soil — was built to come back to life.

All of these plants are designed to flourish themselves… to grow at the right time, in the right place. In field and forest, everything you see is equipped with the ingredients to shake off the sleep of winter and find their way back into the light come spring.

At the right time, at the right temperature, new stems find their way up through last fall’s blanket of leaves to find the light. Mayapples, lilies, violets, wildflowers of all kinds show off their colors to attract pollinators to spread themselves around. Every single one of those plants has instructions on how to proceed.

Even people who don’t have a particular religious attachment to Easter can feel that spring is the season of renewal, new life and the promise of nourishment. The most cynical person still welcomes the return of the warmth and color to the world around them. We feel it — we feel renewed, we feel there are new chances, we feel there’s something ahead, and the promise of more.

The stubbornness, the persistence of the growth cycle is a great reassurance that there is a design at work which can’t easily be knocked off course. What a wonder to watch it unfold in yet another spring. That’s certainly cause for celebration.

One thought on “Spring, Easter & keeping on

  1. If plants growing from seeds that you put in soil are a miracle, then what happens in the wild, and with perennials, is doubly miraculous. Apparently out of nothing comes, very definitely, something – not just one Spring, but year after year. If miracles aren’t a cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: