Spring Fever
Spring, the most yearned-for season, is also the most crazy-making. If you have a back yard or a garden, a kind of obsession can take over. You go to a nursery and imagine this in that little empty corner of the front garden, and that in the bed beside the potting shed. You don’t have any room for these lovelies—but you could develop a whole new scene along the driveway. That’s what you’ll do. And so you come home, your car sprouting branches and leaves out the windows and trunk.
It always begins well. But then there are weeds to pull before they utterly take over, and mulch that has to get down now, and tender trees that need fertilizing now, and certain bushes that can only be pruned now, and actually the lawn needs mowing before the party this weekend. You look at your green little children huddled on the back patio, waiting for you to get them into their own comfortable beds, and think, Maybe I can plant them tonight, spade in one hand, flashlight in the other.
The crazy of spring just erupts with all the promise and potential of the season. If we can just get these beauties in the ground, we think, they’ll be a feast for the senses all summer every summer without end, amen.
I was talking with a friend about our spring overreach, how every year we get into a vernal frenzy. Half of what I was supposed to do never got done and yet, I said to my friend, this spring arose more beautiful than I could ever remember. Somehow, I guess, spring fever half boiled my brain and I thought that I was God. That if I didn’t plant Eden, it would not grow this year.
The next day, I read a poem by Mary Oliver about the inscrutable ways of creation. The poem ends,
How quietly,
and not with any assignment from us,or even a small hint
of understanding,
everything that needs to be done
is done.
My fever broke just a bit, enough for me to lay down my scepter, vacate my throne in heaven and come down to Earth. Here I must still do April’s every needful thing, while remembering that in fact it has already been done.
What a wonderful description of what happens every Spring. I begin in February looking at seed catalogues – and trying to remember to only select half of what I think I’ll need. And even that’s too much – garden god complex strikes again!
Garden God Complex—that’s the term I was looking for!
David, loved the picture of you driving back, little green kids in the back seat, from the (aptly named) nursery. Earlier this morning I listened to The King’s Singers doing several songs, including “April come she will.” Then I drove home and read this.
And I am reading again this morning The Fellowship of the Ring—in which Frodo sets out from the Shire on 13 April. This is a month of surprises.
My garden is my happy place! So beautiful in the spring, when flowers return magically. In the summer, in full color. In the fall, different colors, but still beautiful, but preparing for a long winters nap.In winter, gray, brown. Where did all the flowers go? A quiet kind of beauty!Where there seems to be death there is still life. My happy place.
So it is with God. The happy place in my heart, my faith, my love, my everlasting gratitude. God starts everything with a seed. So small in size but so large in potential!!!I plant the seed with so much hope, but only God can make it grow! Beauty arrives ! God is amazing, but the garden needs my help too. I do so lovingly! I know that even in the coldest winter the seeds live,just as when I am at my most unloveable God still loves me! God gave us His Son. I have only my heart to give Him! Is it enough? I hope so, because in the garden of my heart, God is my happy place!
David – love this. SO true.