Simple thing to say is that they first day of spring marks a point of great relief among those with propensity to believe January and February are simply the annual darkness that we all must endure. And we’ve reached it, that great moment of relief. Yet for those who, like the Mrs., have been busy starting the residents of our garden for the upcoming season the change of season launches genuine happiness upon looking at the sprouts that have begun punching through their starter cells. Their emergence tells us something more, reminds of the world around us. They are a happiness that finds it roots in both the past and the future. It is about being able to see more than just what is right around you in the present. Everything is cyclical.

We’ve been here before. I mean not just in the earlier days back in Indiana where we first grew our home gardens, but also something deeper, something in the blood. It is something that reminds us that as we do the things we do, we do them because of the

very  elements that we are made up of.  We are meant to tend to Creation. The sprouts are here before us because we are doing that which we should be. And it says more, mainly that we are resilient.Tending to creation reminds of us of what our ancestors, near and far did. It connects us to an act beyond the skirmishes we fight each day. They are what survival looks like in the long term. Remind us that we’ve always been strong, always pushed back against the dark and cold that the movement of time will leave us with. Our past must be measured by some degree of success because we are here to speak about it, because we know of this act. And the emergence of these first sprouts ties all this together about our past. We must feel joy with their arrival.  They bring with them the knowledge that not everything is always cold and dark.

For that same line of thought we must know of that which lies ahead of us. A season of warmth, one of growth, and the knowledge that spending time working upon the land will soon be here. We shall emerge too. The sprouts will grow into plants and the warmth and sun will carry us back into the seasons before us, fertile with everything that these sprouts can and should become. We are engaged in creation, we are part of it, we move forward toward in. It is nature to us and beyond the time that we are surrounded with. Creation reminds us much in the early sprouts of a garden. That in spite of the cold and dark that will inevitably be visited upon us there will a rising, a greening, a renewal.