Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Spring

The robins have come to be seen and known again, like harbingers of the new. The clouds roll that certain way again. Greenery is appearing in the stagnant areas once dominated by the brown and gray. One can almost taste the rain in the air again. Days are growing longer and evening is gently giving ground. The feeling and actuality of Spring is here again. Time for renewal and rebirth, to all new things a beginning, to some things a new beginning.

I mean not a somber tone in this post. I am finding as I grow older that I can associate my bouts of nostalgia through seasons. It's a wondrous thing to be able to assign moments and memories with the utmost clarity through seasonal selection. Maybe it's a weird emotional OCD, the need to put each memory, moment and emotion into a category. Maybe it hints at something deeper. All I know is that I am finding the prospect of the newness of this time of year as some sort of promise. I am embracing an almost Zen like hope that perhaps I have made it through to the other side of my darkest days. I am creating my own Dharma, like some Kerouac character bathing in serenity and awareness after traversing through Hell.

For the first time in a very long time, I am feeling hopeful. Maybe it's the acceptance of all the bad, or the fact that I've put it away in the back corners of my mind and submerged it too deep to swim to the surface. As crazy as it may sound, in my mind I have begun the habit of breaking my life into seasons, only not following any set sort of lunar calendar. Now is Spring. I saw the bad as it hurtled towards me during my Autumn, suffered and raged through the Winter of all things dark and harsh. Now I am welcoming Spring, like an old friend who means the world to you or the welcoming embrace a child has for the parent they miss. I am welcoming Spring.

So in this, maybe hope is truly the greatest belief. In this I truly want for nothing more than my new found faith in progression to ring true. Maybe I'm fooling myself. Maybe I am not. But Spring is a promise of all that is new and allowing for wonder. I'm going to put my faith there. Even a bitter realist such as myself can't argue with that.

1 comment:

  1. I sit here, having now read all your posts, and I find myself struggling for words--anything but a routine challenge for me, believe you me.

    As a psychiatrist who feels the pains of war infiltrating (invading?) him day in, day out, I'm somewhat accustomed, perhaps, to being transported into horrors I can never begin to understand, into desperate attempts to make sense of it all, to find a connection that will make some difference, any difference.

    Your words, though . . . my goodness.

    It seems so cheap, so trite even, to tell you how "amazing" your writing is, given all that you've endured, all that you've stood firm for, all that--all whom--you've lost. Yet amazing it is.

    If I may say this: no matter what of your soul you feel you left back in Iraq, I hear--I feel--a soul in your writing that has not gone out like a late autumn firefly, that indeed does resonate like Shakespeare's Henry at Agincourt, that speaks simply, yet ever so complexly, out of a computer somewhere in the middle of the night, a soul that is connecting.

    Trust me: it does.

    I do hope that this post is not your last. I do hope that others will find it as I have. And I do hope that you will continue to speak for your brothers who are desperately trying to find words for what torments them, speak for them even though you, they--and, yes, I--know that words will always fail.

    But know that your words prove beyond doubt that they need not fail completely.

    I look forward to reflecting more on your thoughts, and I hope that I in my own blog I can give them the honor they deserve.

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