Spring?
I sit in my small second floor study and look out at the latest storm – heavy rain at times, wind that blew my gray, plastic trash can down the driveway right into the stubby Japanese maple, a winter survivor. It is mid-April; somewhere it is a beautiful spring day. Here, just another postponement of spring.
When I awoke, music was running through my head, as it does almost every day. What I hear, unbidden, from somewhere in my subconscious, is always appropriate, in touch with my feelings and the state of my life. It has a message, every time, even if it is sometimes indirect.
This day it was “It Might as Well Be Spring.” The song is bittersweet. It evokes the possibility of joy in the season, but the slow tempo betrays the lyrics. It might as well be in a minor key; something is off about the celebration.
I like (is that the right word for something so sad and edgy?) Nina Simone’s version; a young, but already scarred Nina Simone. Think slow-motion, with a wistful, almost dirge-like introduction Frank Sinatra didn’t sing.
The things I used to like, I don't like any more,
I want a lot of other things I've never had before,
It's just like my mamma says, I sit around and mope
Pretending that I am so wonderful and knowing I'm adored.
The song is, as Hammerstein and Rogers wrote, “gay in a melancholy way.”
I yearn to feel the renewal that often comes with spring. Easter, Passover, and Ramadan arrived together this year; what better opportunity for massive hope. And yet, as in the song, there is something down about this spring.
Instead, I feel a sadness, a longing, a wishing, a loss. An endless pandemic bringing isolation and resistance (both my neighbors are down with breakthrough COVID). A vicious assault across the Ukrainian border, complete with genocidal war crimes. American borders crowded with immigrants hoping for a better life in this overheated, unwelcoming country. Never-ending abuse of our environment bringing a devastating warming destroying our habitat. Yet another Black man gunned down by authority. A nation so poisoned by division that its 246-year-old system of government teeters at the edge of extinction.
I could, maybe should, go on; the list is long. It may be important to go down that list and discover the sadness. Because sadness, sorrow, grief are all part of life. I listened this week to Susan Cain on Brené Brown’s podcast “Unlocking Us.” In her new book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, she does for sadness and melancholy what she did earlier for introverts in her best-seller, Quiet. She surfaces the gold inside our sadness.
What she is saying is that melancholy, sorrow, are an integral part of life, not something to be avoided or buried. As we recognize it, see it, take it in, we are incubating the promise and hope that is also part of life. Without sadness there is no joy; they need each other for us to be truly human. In my sorrow I am opening the door to promise.
I want to hang on to that thought. The flowers will come, as they do in Maine, parsimoniously, but beautifully. Buds today means blossoms and leaves tomorrow. Out of all the crises around us, opportunity will arise. The melancholy opens the door to creativity – a movement, a poem, a story, a reaching out, an imagining, an action on Earth Day. Maybe even to a column that salutes this spring of sadness for what it will bring. Joy tomorrow will carry the edge of memory, of sorrow, much as sorrow carries the edge of joy.
I feel your grief and the embrace gold underneath. Blessings to all on Earth Day.
…somewhere it is a beautiful spring day. Grief transformed.