The Spring Machine
With a gust of wind out of the west, suddenly the reddish juniper disappears in a cloud of its own pollen- laden smoke. The Spring machine turns over and sputters into a quiet idling, the ground bass for this morning’s eruption of birdsong.
Just a day later, the April snowstorm sinks into the ground as the afternoon sun moves over the arroyo.
Is the thawing earth and the nest-building that has begun the real evidence of what we like to think of as an eternal return? Or do we need to feel like a bigger part in the equation? Perhaps, just receiving the evidence of the changes happening around us, looking, listening, smelling gives us the most active participation in this eternal return that we need.
No matter how devastating and cold the winter months seem to have left things, the color, sound and smell of the Spring machine now surrounds us with its possibilities. There has been an infernal source beneath the winter months and now it radiates to the surface of our world. The core that burns inside remains like a sheltered source of heat and light that can annually rekindle our blue planet’s hemispheres in turn. The spinning earth turns and turns again tipping on its axis in a slow and stately dance, a choreography we only understand from mathematical calculations but are aware of in the ignition of the Spring machine, as seeds wait beneath our feet and the whole show has its overture.