Spring. It means a lot of things. Completely different things. To move rapidly. To move or to jump up.. or even to lunge forward. That’s one meaning. You know… “They sprang to their feet.”
Or… it could mean you pick up the tab for a meal or something. “She sprang for dinner.” On a different note. Sometimes wood splits. In a boat. “It sprung a leak.” It is all over the place. Not just the leak…. This “spring” thing.
You can find springs in mattresses and in cars. Orrrrr…. there a different kinds of springs in the ground. That could be a place where water or oil wells up from an underground source. And of course, the season Spring. The one we are in the midst of now.
A multi-faceted word. But the one that I am thinking about is when a little teeny growing thing breaks the surface of the ground. When a plant springs up.
This is currently happening all over the place these days. It seems to coincide with the Spring Season. To me, this is miraculous. I think it is incredibly amazing, that beneath the dirt, a little life is just waiting to come out. And when the time is right (hopefully right), that growth emerges. It pushes through the earth and begins to display a beautiful arrangement of leaves, and flowers, and color. Like art. Like magic.
That’s how we humans go sometimes too. If we are lucky.
We have times in our lives when we grow into something new. We find our way. We hit our stride. It could be something about ourselves that we’ve been working on for a long, long time, and suddenly…. we are there. Or it could be a complete and total surprise. Like, no one “knew” we had it in us.
Spring. To arise.
It cannot happen all the time. But when it does, it is quite an astounding and amazing thing. What a world it would be, if each of us, could focus on how “spring” might occur in us. What thing, on this day, could emerge? In what way, can we bloom, and make the world a better place? Even if it is something small. To make something, just a little bit better, in some kind and loving way. Like the beautiful petal on a purple flower. The color. The magic. The wonder. It springs.
============
“We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.”
― Henry Ward Beecher
============
“Is the spring coming?” he said. “What is it like?”…
“It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
============
“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
==========