Spring equinox – the time when the hours of daylight and darkness are equal – arrived just a couple of weeks ago. It should be a time of balance. Yet I feel decidedly unbalanced, like I’m living in a Picasso painting. Everything seems stretched and elongated, nothing is where you expect it to be, things that belong above are below and vice versa. “Surreal” is the best description I can come up with.
Our government continues to unravel at an astonishing pace, and for no good reason, at least that I can discern. Like so many others, I’ve had to incorporate ways to resist and speak out into my daily routine. But it’s easy to become discouraged because for every sign of progress toward slowing or reversing the destruction, something else is destroyed. There seems to be no end in sight.
At the same time, much of my personal life remains untouched. I’m particularly aware of the seasonal shift. No matter what’s happening in the world of human systems and organizations, the earth keeps its own rhythm. As the hours of daylight grow longer the ground is warming. In fact, just a week ago our yard was buried under snow. But warm temperatures these last couple of days have melted the snow and ice leaving only the most stubborn patches in the woods.
The contrast is what makes this moment surreal for me.
The other day I was making my way down our muddy road to the mailbox, preoccupied with the latest assault on democracy, wondering how I’m going to find the energy and the courage to resist it indefinitely when a whiff wet earth brought me back to the present. Allowing myself to feel the warm air, (something we hadn’t had for weeks) I glanced down at the ground. To my amazement, at the edge of the road there were tiny lily stalks peeking up through the gravel and mud.
While I had hoped to see evidence of crocuses in the warmest part of our yard, I never expected to see lilies pushing up through relatively shady, gravel-laced patch. These are the kinds of lilies that grow at will all over fields and roadsides. “Ditch lilies” my husband calls them. There was a time in my life when I dismissed the value of these tall orange flowers, sometimes even considering them weeds that needed to be pulled out and tossed away.
But here’s the thing – no matter how much I’ve tried to remove the ditch lilies, they always come back. Not only that, but they also have a way of rooting themselves in the spot where they’re discarded. This is how I came to have lilies as far as the eye can see on our property.
“Consider the lilies of the field…” Jesus famously said. In recent years I’ve finally followed his advice. No more so than this year, when so many things I once counted on seem to be vanishing.
Considering those lilies has added a new dimension to the surreal painting I’m living in. They don’t care what’s going on in the wider world, they just continue to do what they were meant to do. They persist in their cycle of pushing their way through semi-frozen ground (what a lot of work that must be!), growing as tall as they can manage, flowering, gracefully dying away, sending their energy back into the earth to do it all over again.
Unlike lilies I don’t have the luxury of looking away from what’s going on in the wider world. But I’m realizing that it’s also critical to pay attention to what’s going on in my immediate environment. There are plenty of things that are still working just as expected.
As I continue to seek the energy to respond to the deep disturbances in the larger world, the tenacity of the lilies in my yard has bolstered my strength and courage. They help restore a sense of balance in this equinox season.