We are running now, running toward the halfway point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. Easter has come and the green blade rises along every hill and dale. Our days are long.
They are long and they are good.
Walk through a field or forest this time of year, along the stone walls and hedgerows, scan the the hillsides, and your wandering eye will be met with nothing but green, long desired and now present green. You become imbued with the sense that there is an incredible prejudice in your favor, that you are going to win. Here, now from the warmest meadow to the darkest ravine it is undeniable: anything good that can happen will happen.
The bluebirds are back in the meadow. They flicker from bird house to the antique hay rake sinking into the field, their color so vivid to illicit a gasp. One pair has claimed the birdhouse on the knoll and they slip in and out of its little hole like a secret kept between them, the ever-growing grass, and the wind. A mated pair keeps watch, one atop the house, the other atop the hay rake, its rusted tines tangled with the dark stems of last year’s goldenrod. That rake hasn’t turned a field in generations, but now it holds a different purpose, an altar of sorts for these feathered harbingers of bright days. To watch a bluebird land there, on iron made useless by time but still offering itself to beauty, is to believe the world is ever-conspiring inevitably toward grace.
Then, come evening, the peepers begin. They begin all at once anywhere there is still water until the woods vibrate with their insistence. They call from the vernal pools that formed in low places, their voices threading through the spaces between dusk and night, between cold and warmth, between winter and summer. You never see the peepers. It is a chorus that seems to rise from the ground itself, and if you stop to listen, really listen, it becomes clear that something more is being sung. A thinning occurs here, in the lull between light and dark, when you can almost feel another world brushing up against this one. You walk the edge of the pond or the woodline and feel it, the marrow-deep memory of something just at the periphery. Something good and slow and green. These frogs know something we don’t. Something we so easily forget: that, despite all the wounds in this world, it is still safe to sing, the light will return, that the good things are on the move with a passion.
Walk into the forest now, past the blue birds in the meadow and through the frog song at the tree line. It is dark here, and the echo of winter whispers still. These hills are old and they have leveled with age but there are still deep places, dark places. Deep in the High Wood, there are steep hillsides where rivers have cut their long, slow will. Down in these ravines, where the sun barely reaches and the snow lingers longest, another quiet resurrection is taking place. It feels secret. It feels old. First the ramps. They are up now, bright green spears pushing through last year’s leaf litter. They’re bold and young, like swords thrust triumphantly toward the heavens. Optimism incarnate. Alongside them the fiddleheads uncurl slowly, their tight spirals relaxing with the warmth, their velvet skins still damp from the thaw. They are older, eldritch and staff-like in their spiral, their mystery. These are the foods of old stories, of first harvests, of foragers who walked softly and listened well. You have to stoop to find them, to get close, to enter their world for a moment. When you do however, it’s hard not to feel that the ground itself is giving you a gift. It is unearned, yet given freely all the same. In the dark places, the deep places, life has returned, simultaneously ancient and new.
And so we run on, toward the halfway point between the equinox and the solstice, toward long days filled with light and promise. Easter has passed, but its echo remains. The green blade rises, and with it, so do we. The good things gather now not in isolation, but in chorus. Everything good all at once, overwhelming. The meadow, the marsh, the ravine…they all speak the same voice. This is not coincidence. This is not accident. This is the good green pattern of life declaring it is wholly good.
Anything good that can happen will happen.
And it is happening now.
Echoes from an Old Hollow Tree is published free on Wednesdays. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can continue to bring you these reflections from our little hill in Vermont. Thank you.
