Spring Margin

[Seasons: Spring XVI]

Like a train, momentum picks up on the farm in spring, and if you’re not ahead of it, it can steamroll you. There’s no margin for time in summer, which is why planning and efficiency in spring is so important. 

Another thing happens in spring due to the high demand on efficient execution: unaddressed problems are revealed. Anything left undone from previous years hides under the slow moving winter fog, but as soon as spring breaks and the last frost is in the rear view mirror, all problems are exposed. 

On our farm, it is simply impossible to address every problem, smooth out every hiccup, and address every inefficiency. Spring reminds us of this. Despite my best effort, I’m always behind on chopping wood, weeding, and replacing dripping spigots. Always. 

Life also has seasons that pickup momentum, expose our unaddressed problems, and threaten to run us over. How do we build margin in? And if there’s just no way to do it, how do we foresee the coming summers and build in the margins of time before they get here?

I don’t like the trite answers here. I tend to think it’s more than simply taking time off or scheduling in vacation. It seems deeper. More complex. Perhaps something that gets at the heart of me feeling alone in my to-dos, isolated in my chores. 

Spring needs margin. My life needs it too. Yours?

Inhale & Exhale

[Seasons: Spring XV]

Several religious traditions I’m aware of associate breath with life. It makes sense; the first thing a newborn does upon delivery is take a big breath (and then cry). And one’s last breath is often considered the moment life ends. 

The creation account in my tradition has a beautiful rendition of how humanity received breath-life. The Creator gave it to us directly. In other words, the very breath (or spirit) of God filled our lungs with vitality. 

Winter is the season that life is withdrawn. Life returns in spring. What the winter takes, the spring gives as a gift. Year in and year out the leaving and returning, withdrawing and reemerging, and taking and giving of life is the ebb and flow of seasons. 

Did God inhale before God exhaled into humanity? I’d like to think so. Not that God needs metaphorical lungs, but instead that the inhale-exhale gift of life parallels the very inhale-exhale of the seasons. 

Spring reminds us that the withdrawing of life becomes the very gift of life again. God’s inhale and exhale were not a one time creative act but are the annual gift God keeps giving.

The Motive is Joy

[Seasons: Spring XIV]

The splendor of spring is excessive. Even profligate!

Is it because spring doesn’t conduct a cost-benefit analysis before deciding to launch? Or, is it that spring doesn’t run the vision through the executive team for efficiency assessment? Perhaps spring should send its budget to the finance committee first. 

Spring would get shut down in any of our institutional channels. It’s inefficient. Superfluous. 

It’s likely because spring’s only motive is joy. It’s not pragmatic or calculated. The colors and scents and energy are the natural world’s party and it has a limitless line of credit. Nothing is too expensive. Nothing is too extravagant. 

Unencumbered joy, excessive beauty, and superfluous gifts of life and grace are traits of the divine. Spring is a reminder that divine presence can look like spring flourishing.

Mid-Spring

[Seasons: Spring XIII]

Somewhere in the middle of spring, which is roughly the first week of June, the natural world completely wakes up. 

The last of the spring flowers are up and in bloom. Weeds have built momentum in the garden and are now a daily chore. Spring-born animals already have doubled or tripled in size. The small nubs on fruit trees that were the promise of future harvest are recognizable shapes. 

June is the spring month of no return. The growth and momentum are too powerful to control; one can only give into it.

I like to think of spring as collective energy—all the forces of nature, including the different components on the farm, are working together toward universal advancement. It defies our metrics of progress and our measurements of efficiency. The energy is both synchronized and chaotic, orderly and random. It’s excessive and yet nothing seems wasted. It doesn’t appear to have a common vision but seems to all be headed somewhere. 

Mid and late spring are a micromanager’s nightmare but an artist’s dream: all the color and energy one could dream of with none of the protocol and control. In this way appreciating spring without seeing it as work-needing-to-be-done is a spiritual discipline. I’m reminded that nature doesn’t operate according to a users manual but is instead the outflow of divine creative energy.

Relational Thawing

[Seasons: Spring XII]

We all have relationships that need thawing. These aren’t necessarily the family ties that caused us a lot of harm, or worse, injured us. They aren’t the friendships we lost along the way due to distance and time. Frozen relationship are cold encounters we have often. Occasionally they are cordial but they are never warm. 

Spring is the season for thawing. When the sun stays out longer and days grow warmer, (inter-specie) connections reawaken and the natural world begins its lively interactions again. Consider the bees and flowers. 

Spring promotes relational thawing. We often prefer to keep relationships in the winter freeze because winter justifies little more than hibernating and self-preservation. Without intentional warmth, the winter cold threatens to become permafrost.

Which relationships could use a little warmth and sun?

Hope & Risk in Spring

[Seasons: Spring XI]

Hope is a dangerous enterprise. 

Hope doesn’t need an execution plan to ground it in what’s real. Hope is the action. And that’s why it’s dangerous. It always assumes the full spectrum of risks found in change and growth and what’s new. 

Spring promotes hope on the farm. A farmer doesn’t hope his seeds will germinate and eventually produce food. Hope *is* the planting of seeds. Hope is mixing the growing medium in the greenhouse. Hope is putting on the rubber boots before heading out to do the work. 

It’s spring but it can still freeze. 
The buds are about to open. 
So are the daffodils. 
But they might die under the pressure of frost. 

We prepare the seeds anyways because the world we dream of includes this kind of food. Despite the risk. Despite the grief and hardship. And that’s hope. It’s the doing before the forecast is for sure, before the changes are permanent and guaranteed.

Paradoxes & New Life

[Seasons: Spring X]

I begin my work in the hoophouse in early spring. The plastic cover protects the seedlings from suffering a premature death due to frost exposure. 

Spring is a paradox, as it both signals the time for dormant plants to awaken, sprout, and grow, but it also has the power to kill those same plants. It brings longer days, warmer sun, and the promise of summer’s ideal growing conditions, but it daily threatens to swallow any progress into its fridgid belly. 

The seasons of life are full of paradoxes. We dismiss their complexity when we think of them in dualistic terms—as good or bad, positive or negative, easy or tough. As a consequence, the season we are living in and the season we imagine we’re living in are in conflict. Only by holding them in tension—the good with the bad, the life with the death—can we fully experience their richness. 

Then we can honestly and accurately face the hardship and embrace the blessings. 

I’ve witnessed a lot of death in the wake of overly simplistic understandings of life’s seasons. On the farm, this means young plants will surely die. The same occurs to tender new growth in our lives.

Close and Infectious

[Seasons: Spring IX]

Spring is a time for births on the farm, when babies burst onto the stage of life and earn the spotlight. We have Nubian goats, so the babies are gifted with disproportionately long velvety ears and short noses. I’m yet to meet a farm visitor that doesn’t want to hold a baby Nubian goat.

The innocence of new life is magnetic and infectious, as it draws everyone close and makes onlookers sense their own youthfulness. 

Innocences is vulnerable. It’s dependent. Tender. Fragile. 

We all love the innocence of the baby farm animals but we fear innocence in ourselves. What are we missing by hiding our own spring births, whereby we share our new-found innocence with others? By protecting our vulnerability, we miss the opportunity to draw others close and share in our youthfulness. 

Green Paint

[Seasons: Spring VI]

Have you ever seen a building painted green? It’s rare, but it happens.  

The motive for a green building is innocent enough: to match the natural landscape. Makes sense, except it’s impossible to match the greens found in nature. Spring makes up for winter’s monotone pallet with hundreds, if not thousands, of shades of green. All at once, trees, grasses, and brush burst with a collage of flamboyant green-ness. It’s seasonal code that life has something to say to death’s attempt at ending the story. And spring does it with such excessive force that when it's underway one might think it’s permanent. 

There’s no way to match spring's profligate green. Should one try, the bland green-like paint is guaranteed to look flat and lifeless. 

Do your building a favor: don’t embarrass it by trying to match spring green.

Artificial Light Needs

[Seasons: Spring VII]

The winter solstice is the longest night of the year. After midnight, the darkness begins to shorten and the light of day lengthens. It’s barely noticeable until somewhere in February or early March. By the spring equinox, March 20 or 21, the sun sets measurably later and rises before most people are up for work. 

Spring is marked by more natural light and consequently less artificial light. Car rides on the way home from soccer practice don't need headlights. Morning and evening chores on the farm don’t require headlamps. And the motion light in the barn rarely illuminates, as the animals are tucked in before dark. 

Life’s springs are marked by more natural light too. We work hard to illumine our surroundings in other seasons, but when spring is upon us, very little effort is required to see what’s before us. We can measure the springs of life by artificial light sources less.

Consider for a moment the “artificial light” many religious institutions offer. Clearly many that need that illumination aren’t truly experiencing the light of spring.

Perpetual Garlic

[Seasons: Spring V]

What’s the first sign of spring? My grandma used to say it was the crocuses. “I’ve seen them bloom right through the snow.” I’ve never witnessed that phenomenon, though I’ve seen them in bloom while snow was yet scattered in pockets of shade. 

I have seen something else sprout through the snow. Every year, it seems. And they come up at least two weeks before crocuses. 

Garlic. 

If there’s anything I’ve grown heaps of year in and year out, it’s garlic. And garlic, despite popular usage, is not a seasoning or garnish. Sure, it’s used in those ways, but for my family it is medicine. My children learn the word antibacterial an antiviral at a very young age, and they learn it in reference to Papa’s garlic. 

It’s “medicinal" in another another way. Since it’s a staple at our house, it hits the hot pan of oil before anything else, emitting an aroma that signals dinner is approaching. The scent is medicine for the heart—it’s a reminder that when the world is adrift, a warm, healthy meal is an anchor of safety and acceptance. 

When the garlic pokes through the snow, we take inventory of our stores in the garage. We’re on our third year now that we’ve managed to store the exact amount we need to last us until harvest the following year. 

Seasons come and go. Garlic, for us, remains. We all need nourishment that transcends the season. Something that is there in the middle of winter but also in the in-between times. We all need something healthy that sprouts before the snow melts and lasts through the summer glow. 

What’s your perpetual garlic?

Resurrection Death?

[Seasons: Spring IV]

Spring is resurrection. The death of the winter gives way to new life. Everywhere. 

Bare, lifeless trees leaf out and green foliage returns. Buds form, blooms break open, and vibrant hues that were lulled from our memory during the long, grey winter months, return as if for the first time. The flowers that gave up to the frost of autumn, died in the early winter, but not without leaving a genetic legacy. Their seeds rise to the greet the warming sun, honoring the gifts of ultraviolet rays. 

The return of life is only part of what I mean when I say that spring is resurrection. 

Resurrection implies death. And death—at least the dying of something—implies former life. Baked into the meaning of resurrection is a life-death-life cycle. Resurrection as the moment life returns is a narrow understanding of the fuller meaning of the life-death-life cycle that is found universally in nature. 

Seasons follow a cycle; they return the same time each year at basically the same time and to the same effect. For this reason spring is a good reminder that resurrection is not only new life, but it’s the memory of an old life lost, the darkness of death, new life, and the promise of life and death in the future.  

We all experience the life-death-life cycle. Resurrection is available to us all, as we accustom ourselves to this template for new life.

Before Spring Bloom

[Seasons: Spring III]

Before there’s life bursting from the end of every branch, spring comes and yet it feels lifeless. We must look closely. Bulging under the soil are the crocuses; taking shape are the daffodil spears. The tree buds that eventually burst with pink and white and unfold with the spritely green of new leaves must first take bulbous shape and wait for weeks. Sometimes months. 

Long in advance of spring's new life, the conditions for that new life are being prepared. All the obvious signs of advancement and growth proceed from less obvious signs, which often require a keen eye to notice. 

There’s a deep truth here to behold: new life is but the public display of the deep, slow, less obvious preparation that precedes it. What I don’t mean is that long before we see renewal, growth, change, advancement, maturation, or resurrection, people are *working* privately before their public debut. Spring doesn’t exert itself to squeeze to the surface the first asparagus shoot; no, there are holy forces at work preparing the conditions for that emergence, and spring is merely the setting. 

We are the bearers, the setting, the soil of divine work preparing us for renewal. The work is underway long before we show obvious signs of it, long before our life is a living testimony of spring bloom. The evidence is there but it takes a keen, patient eye to notice.

Early Spring

[Seasons: Spring II]

There’s a truth about spring, like a family secret, that is stuffed and hidden. Before spring is sprung it's the worst kind of winter. In other words, before spring is full of life, it’s a dark, wet mess. 

Life is full of the darkness of winter—times that are relentlessly troubling, draining, and debilitating. When questions return without answers. When searching leads to dead ends. When suffering begets more pain. When brokenness and stress and chaos is unbearable. The promise of spring is no consolation when spring finally arrives and it’s indistinguishable from winter.  

Consolation in suffering is not the promise of less suffering. Promises of better days always return void to some degree because they never come soon enough and when they arrive, if they do, we’re confronted with the truth that there is new suffering. Consolation in suffering is the affirmation of suffering. Not because pointing at something bad and saying, “That’s bad!” somehow makes it magically better, but because suffering is compounded in secret and grows in isolation. 

Early spring reminds us that every season if full of darkness and mud. Pretending it’s all cherry blossoms makes the gloom all the more unbearable.

Virility Returns

[Seasons: Spring I]

Spring is the setting of love stories and ballads and climactic scenes in romantic comedies. It’s cliche. An easy setting for almost any storyline needing an incontestable subtext of possibility and beauty.

The 90’s group, Sublime, said it’s summertime where the living is easy, but that’s because they were rebelling against the norm. It’s late spring, when warm days are yet too humid, the warming sun is still welcomed (and not blocked), and mother nature is throwing paint at the earth’s canvas, where the easy living gets fully underway. 

Spring is the only season that’s also a verb: to bounce or snap. Of course it means that. Everything in spring has a bit of “bop” in its “step”. Virility returns in spring. Hope is everywhere. 

Spring, Easter, Life. They’re virtually synonymous.

Freezing/Thawing Fingers

[Seasons: Winter XVIII]

Have you ever tried working in freezing temperatures? If you have, you know that there aren’t gloves warm enough to keep your fingers from going numb. One’s entire body can be warm while ten fingers, from the second knuckle down, are pulsating in semi-frozen pain. 

But it’s not the frozen agony that hurts the worst. Once back in the warmth of the home, it’s the thawing that is the most painful. It can drop an adult to his knees begging for mercy. 

Like finger tips in the winter, truth can hurt on the front end; it’s downright painful on the back end. 

There’s a simple reason for this: for truth to be fully encountered and understood, it must be applied, which requires practice. An idea, concept, or theory, on their own, change nothing. Embodied ideas, utilized concepts, and applied theories create change. 

The thawing of fingers is not separate from their freezing; it’s (the worst) part of the same experience. Thawing will *always* happen. When it comes to encountering truth, change will always happen. Without change, it’s ethereal, merely an idea. Or, without change, truth is not fully true.

Husbanding Our Inner Life

[Seasons: Winter XVII]

Winter is the most threatening season for animals on the farm. Responsibility of care is rarely felt by the caretaker; it’s passed on, down the line, to the nearest dependent. Neglecting husbanding responsibilities can quickly lead to death. 

Neglecting the spiritual life is passed on too. What we don’t heal we transfer; what we don’t address and tend to we pass on, down the line, to the nearest dependent. This is often our children.  

Neglect can look like a lot of things. On the farm it looks like unfinished chores. Regarding the spiritual life, it looks like diversion, avoidance, busyness, detachment, and even religiosity. 

We all have chores. Daily chores. It’s time we husband our own inner life.

Winter Ground

[Seasons: Winter XVI]

Winter is minimalist, or at least it demands minimalism. 

It takes the leaves away. It steals the sun. It refuses to allow for the the quick and easy activity changes of a warmer seasons. More preparation is required for the same amount of work, which usually means less work, more efficient planning, and a simplification of life. 

With less “stuff” and fewer “things”, winter is a season of exposure (i.e. less concealment). By removing what’s unnecessary, winter shows us what is. The leaves fall off the trees and we can see the forest floor clearly. We can also see the neighbors, the old piece of metal siding discarded in the woods three summers ago, and that old birch tree that’s finally given up and ready to rest horizontally. 

The ground is visible in winter; the Ground of Being is more visible too. Paul Tillich famously referred to God as the Ground of Being, that which is beneath and supportive of and imperative for all things. the minimalism of winter helps us see—and, I think, encounter—the Ground beneath all things.

Liminal Seasons

[Seasons: Winter XV]

Compared to some harsh winters around the world, the PNW is mild. Winter never fully arrives, it seems. It’s more like seasonal hopscotch, touching down for a bit, lifting, and touch down again in a slightly different way. The front half of winter feels like an autumn-winter mix; the latter half of winter is a similar spring-winter mix. 

I lived in Idaho for a time; the winter-spring mix was known as "winter breakup". Spring hasn’t taken hold, but winter is growing weaker. The snow is slushy, the piles of plowed snow accumulation begin to shrink, and the roads are muddy. Not winter. Not Spring. An unbecoming liminal season somewhere between the two. 

We think life is supposed to be distinctly in one season or another, but most of it happens in the liminal between—it’s never cleanly one “way” or the other. It’s always a mix between there and here, that season and the one unfolding. It’s alway winter breakup; sort of like the PNW. 

It’ll serve us well to begin embracing the liminal nature of seasons in our life.

Solidarity & Difference

[Seasons: Winter XIV]

Winter is a universal phenomenon, but it’s not simultaneously occurring. As most of us remember, the earth rotates on a tilted axis, so the northern and southern hemispheres experience opposite seasons. There is likely an identical experience of winter 5,000 miles south of me . . . in six months. 

We have solidarity, which is a unity in experience. But I’m quite aware that my global neighbor is likely wearing different clothes, eating different seasonal foods, participating in different activities, and concerned about different life pressures right now. While they will experience what I do, they currently aren’t. Not even close. 

Both an awareness of solidarity and difference is necessary for empathy. 

Winter for me now will be winter for someone else later. And when it is, my heart can (and should) be more open for them, and more gracious to their particular experience.