52 Weeks ~ New Beginnings (13/52)

Spring. Easter. Passover. Renewal.

You can feel it in the air, hear it, and smell it, can’t you?

Geese honking their way overhead: “Are we there yet?” “I swear we should have taken a right at that last river branch.”

Crocus shoots yawning and stretching, poking their pointy fingers up through the winter-hardened soil.

Tender leaf buds unfolding from reddened branches like summer sheets being shaken out for the first time since the fall.

The winter-shorn field lies stretched out like a blank page: Write on me. Make me into a story.

As any writer knows, the blank page offers its own special brand of terror. What if I’m not up to the challenge? What if I don’t know how to fill that blank page? Or what if I fill it with something ugly, untrue, sentimental, worthless?

Winter asks nothing of you other than to get through it. Hunker down, pull the blankets up, shovel the walk, move the wood inside, keep the water buckets unfrozen.

Spring, in its youthful, exuberance asks for everything. NOW! Take up where you dozed off last November. Plant the garden, muck the barn, clean the basement, paint the dingy hallway walls, renew hibernating friendships, make plans, create.

I recently unyoked myself from an obligation that weighed me down daily and made me dread Monday mornings the way I hadn’t in years. I have immediate plans to be busy, finishing up some other work projects and tackling some long-ignored house projects, but, after that, I plan to just…Stop.

For a bit.

For the first time in my working, adult life, I’ll be quiet and let the door of my imagination sit ajar for a bit to see what will pass through.

Maybe it will just be a brief rest before I take up the work I know how to do, or maybe it will give me the space to see the thing sitting on the horizon at a distance that’s meant for me. I really don’t know. I’m nervous as all get out. And a tiny bit excited.

A new beginning?

Let’s find out together.