I can't hold back Spring ...

Or Life either. For all I love Winter, it is the ... pause ... that is most dear. The quietude. The peacefulness, actually ... the now. Yes, I love watching the storms roll in and barrel their way across the landscape from the windows, but note, it is watching the storms that I love. Observing. Seeing. The marvelous and ever-changing view neither requires nor asks any action on my part.

Especially if the weather outside is frightful, I sit inside and simply enjoy the view and the passing of time. A most delicious day is one spent by the fireplace with good music and good books and a view of the roiling storms passing through, expending their fury on the lands surrounding. A good companion or two make the passing time even more enjoyable, and these are the moments that are most wondrous for me. Comforting and satisfying to my soul.

The world and the weather simply move on by, and unless I need to repair damage to something, I am unaffected by them except for the pleasure they provide me. Add a glass of fine liquid, say fresh coffee mixed to my taste, a single-malt Scotch, or glass of Merlot and the passing of time is heavenly. And again, peaceful.

But now, Spring comes. And with it, Busy-ness. Hecticity. Action. Things need doing. So many things need doing ... there's Growth everywhere, much of which needs controlling, like the grass and the fruit trees wanting to sprout new limbs EVERYWHERE ... and so much action is required of me. I can't merely sit and watch, as to keep my lands and buildings looking well and being well I must become very active. There's so much to do.

Life is so busy. So not-peaceful. So exuberant and un-controlled and so often, un-expected. Spring flings us into the pell-mell rush of summer, with all its excesses. Its newness. Just as I get comfortable with the now it is gone, never to come again. It bounces me back and forth and forces me to venture OUT.

THERE. Where the unexpected and the new play and frolic while awaiting their favorite game, the ambush of the quietude and the peace of the pause.

I can't hold back Spring, of course, any more than I can hold back Life. Why all this rush to the future? What's wrong with ... now? Ever must I steel myself for the ongoing rush of Life when Spring comes a'calling. It's that time again ... to put away the joy and comfort of Peace, and brace myself for the brash bruising that is Spring and Summer. For another year.

For the Love of January ...

I'm noticing right now, how totally BUMMED I am that it is already February ... and it's made me think a bit. Why is it so much a downer for me? This isn't at all in jest, for this is what I do feel most sincerely, and with every fiber of my being. And so I've been pondering this for the whole month of January: why do I feel most at home and in-balance with the world around me in a month most others seem to dread?

I love the "feel" of December: I'm a total Advent junkie, hooked and NEVER looking for a "cure". I find myself only wishing December was twice as long as it is every year. Still, that doesn't say anything about January. As I thought and puzzled about my love of January, I noted to myself how odd it was because nothing happens in January, really. And I found the answer within that statement. Hercule Poirot loves to have the ever-factual and direct Captain Hastings about while he is solving crimes as Captain Hastings will always make the most obvious and seeming-less useless observation of something. Yet in that statement, some little fact pops up that stirs Poirot's famous little grey cells of brain-matter to connect other seemingly un-related dots. Voila, we learn something!

And so the understanding came from within that observation to myself that it's strange to love January (as I must do). The obvious following thought is this: nothing really happens during the month, so how could one "love" ... nothing? As with Poirot and his Hastings', right there in the obvious I found my answer. I realized that I love the peaceful-ness of January, the pause in the year, when it seems every thing "stops". Nothing's growing, we stay in-doors and hunker down of an evening by the fire with a good book, some music, a movie or so on the television/dvd player.
Me, the person who always wanted to be out and about when younger ... wants little more than a quiet evening at home, a fire, and a few loved ones close by. What a change from the "Neil" of thirty years ago!

By the end of February buds and shoots and the first bulb-flowers are appearing, and the pace gets dizzyingly faster week by week. LIFE just gets very busy, hecticity abounds, and off we go for another roller-coaster ride through the year. I watch others as they THRILL to this, the "coming-alive" of the world around us, as I've heard it described, and I note how different I am. How different I am from even what *I* used to be.

I now love the pause, the contemplative time, the inward-ness of January. I love the storms outside and the fire inside, the sense of snugging down to let the world go by. To think unfettered by the need to "do" whatever it is that needs done today. To feel, to sense, and to float in the pool of the Quiet of Now.
I do get my month of that each year, but it's never enough. And as I get older, I find I want that month to be longer.
Robert Neil Haugen,
1 February, 2010