Sometimes, I can feel the sun, before it rises. I can feel the clearness of the morning skies on a cellular level, like trumpeters announcing with fanfare an approaching Queen. THE approaching Queen. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have been swimming in grey for weeks, and now I feel like dancing.

I did dance, this morning. I put on highly inappropriate music and bounced around my living room, around my bathroom. I danced in front of my aging reflection, and mouthed words of welcome to the spring. Toothpaste went everywhere, because: multitasking. 

Last year, around this time, I walked to the ocean just before dawn. I sat on the sandstone formations that make up McFarlane Beach, and waited for the light. It came, but not as I expected: it was not a silver thread spreading where the mountains touched the lightening sky. It was more the drawing down a curtain. The sun washed from the treetops down to where I sat on the rock. At that moment, I really did feel a part of everything. I am reluctant to name god/dess, but in that moment, I felt profound evidence that this blissful light that touches everything, touches me, too (and conversely, the light that touches me touches everything else).

Isn’t this the closest thing to being in love? This anticipation and expansion? This soft, soft air like a whispered kiss on our skin? 

It is so easy to contract in winter’s fallow, to forget that spring could not be held back, even if we tried.  Let us all be like apple trees, preparing to bloom.