Ground down........

We are in the midst of a string of beautiful days. Spring air on the skin has a different quality than air at any other time of the year. Spring air stirs the body to movement, to awareness of the moment, to the beauty that surrounds us. Students are tempted to cut classes, young men want to fall in love, older men talk softly or read poetry or play chess while sipping coffee in the sunlight. Ever hopeful gardeners begin to turn the soil and dream of weedless abundance, sweet tomatoes and tender greens unmolested, despite already gathering armies of bugs and blights. Spring air caresses pale winter limbs and promises something more, more than can ever come to be.


So why am I feeling ground down? This often happens, as the air warms and the days lengthen. The torpor of winter gives way to a feeling that I am unworthy of spring. I will waste its gifts. The lavish blue of the sky, the longer evenings, the very first hints of buds on bushes: these are all wasted on me. Nature gives me something each spring that I will not use, or at least that I will not use sufficiently and well. Though I dislike winter, it is my season, tailor made for me. Bleak and depressed, grey and forbidding, short and dark, these fit me.  Any other time, and I see more clearly that I am out of sync. But most of all, I am out of sync with spring.


"Enjoy these days, nature beckons." And I reply falsely that I will. If spring promises too much, why should I not promise too much in response? Both spring and I know well: we will not last.