You can't hurry love. No, you just have to wait. You got to trust, give it time, No matter how long it takes. (The Supremes)
Neither can you hurry spring.
I've learned you can't hurry much of anything. Or, rather, you can try, but the results will never be quite what you hoped for.
Spring is like a baby waking from a nap. Slowly. Eyes flicker momentarily. More sleep. Another flicker. One eye opens. More sleep, but lighter. Until finally, fully awake, life resumes after a long winter's nap.
A week ago a friend and I drove to a pretty place. We had our cameras and hoped for the tease of early spring, which was only a week away, but with both eyes tightly shut, spring still snored. The day was cold with patches of snow in the deep woods, mud in the sun, and varied shades of brown everywhere. Pretty enough for winter's end, but we were impatient for a change.
As we chatted in the parking lot before heading home, Lisa gently fingered some soft magnolia buds on the pruned branches in my truck bed. They were fuzzy, mouse-grey, full of life's promise. Like soft sacrificial lambs--the rest of the tree would be better without them--they awaited the brush pile at the landfill. Lisa seemed to be comforting the buds in some unconscious way as she touched them while we talked.
I got home and pulled the branches from the truck, clipped the ends, and stuck them in water. To have come so close to blooming and then be tossed seemed sad, a waste, a loss.
"Maybe I should have waited until fall," my husband said, but he's a hurry-up guy. The tree needed pruning, so he pruned. He didn't feel the ouch, or hear the cries. I did.
I wasn't sure if the branches would respond, but days later buds began to open; the grey fuzz split to reveal white petals. Small green leaves sprouted. Weeks ahead of the tightly clamped buds on the mother tree in the yard, these were opening.
It appears I can hurry spring.
But somehow it feels, if not wrong, not quite right, either. I'll enjoy the forced beauty, and try not to think of caged birds that should fly free. The flowers will grace the kitchen, even as I look beyond them through the window to the tree that will bloom freely on it's own time.
~~~~~
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.~Lao Tzu
Comments
Peace - D
s, who lives where it is always green and has to look hard to see signs of spring, but they are there. We are still in the northern hemisphere and, believe it or not, seeds planted in January don't do well.