Brookgreen Gardens – April 2, 2022

APRIL

Spring, for all her forward aspirations, keeps close ties to winter. The future grows out of precariousness: tiny shoots of asparagus push from the slowly thawing earth under a short-lived sun, soft marsh grass and fiddle head ferns hide in the under belly of the dripping woods, and small, green things rise in the glance of an eye, fleeting and rare, fragile and tender, unprotected and exposed, endearing. Birth in spring among soggy pastures, cold flocks, and delicate buds is never easy. Shad and salmon driven by blind instinct struggle against the stream to deliver new life in the warmer, upper reach of the rivers. Young lambs born in February, die in April. Life is taken so that it might be given. A young rabbi walks to Jerusalem and disappears forever into springtime. Yet for all of this, springtime is never weak, just young, delicate and unarmed. More than a season, spring is a pattern that rises out of nature, a string winding through the labyrinth, and archetype that leads out. When old patterns atrophy and institutions no longer work, spring appears with her images of birth, childhood, and beginnings. It comes as earth tilts into the solar winds, or at any time when energy and time seem spent. April is a time and place in the soul. It spells springtime, the coming of flowers, but also hesitates. In April, yearning and remembrance, completeness and incompleteness mix painfully. More than a month, April may be the human situation written large – lifetimes never completely fulfilled, yet never fully incomplete.

All the Days of My Life, Iona Center: from The Daybook spring 1995.

Opening reflection chosen and read by Nancy L.

Today on my walk I reflected on the opposites we hold: yearning and contentment, light and shadow, openness and selectiveness, certainty and uncertainty. Sometimes they co-exist in relative ease, and sometimes they move us in a cycle of frenzy, a bouncing back and forth, hardly harmonious. As I walked the gardens and noticed how things stood or grew in relation to one another, this word came to my mind: sunthesis (like synthesis, only with a u). How the light of day brings different parts together into something new! It made me smile to think that finicky shout-out-loud azaleas and majestic enduring but understated live oaks each live into their time in the sun.

Photos and reflection by Amy W.