Woodspriestess: The Language of Spring

A blush of green begins

Delicate lace of wild plums
Graces gray forestscapes

Heartbeat in the forest sings
The passion of life untapped.
The soul of the world
is speaking the language of spring.

This morning I went outside and swooned to see that the wild plum trees bloomed in the night! (Or at some other recent date and I didn’t notice until this morning?!) There are two small ones right near the house and more dotted throughout the woods and I love them. I also stepped over by the woodpile and right onto the wild violets that grow as a wonderful little carpet over there—they’re my very favorite tiny flower of spring and I actually gave a little shout of happiness to see them! An old-new friend coming back to visit. While I like seeing things that other people have planted or that I’ve planted myself, there’s really nothing like seeing what the ecosystem has planted on its own.

I went ahead and headed to the woods then with two of my kids (the third kid was inside making pies!) I had a bit of deja-vu-ish moment, because I remember delighting in the violets and taking pictures of them at this time last year when I went on a 300 Things walk with my daughter (which in hindsight was my first ever “woodspriestess” post).

Couldn’t resist a picture of these delicious curls too (Hey! They’re “springy” in their own right 😉 )

While I couldn’t get a very good picture of it because of the breeze, I  also checked on the progress of the memorial tulip tree we planted for my third baby. I have been a little worried about it, because the buds don’t seem to be changing much, but we’ve got color!

And, at my parents’ house where the matching tree resides, they’ve got a whole bunch of flowers already!

When I wrote my final reflection for my Ecology and the Sacred class, I included this reflection on those things we plant…

…on the same road on which we live, there are several former homesites, with a variety of introduced plant life that continues to bloom each year. Around the corner from us is a ramshackle house that has not been inhabited for about 50 years. It has a gorgeous flowering quince that blooms each spring and dozens and dozens of iris bloom as well, making bright spots of color barely visible through the trees that have grown up to nearly cover the house. The home in which my parents live (one mile away) is a restored log cabin originally built in 1899 and moved to the current location from a spot out by the gravel road. Jonquils had been planted along the front of the house and in the yard area (so, sometime during the early 1900’s, I would imagine) and those jonquils continue to bloom each year in the now-woods and by my parents’ house, where my mom transplanted some originals along with the house itself. When driving down the gravel road in the springtime, there is another location of a previous home that is only identifiable visually when the jonquils bloom and as their yellow glow catches your eye through the trees, you can also see a small footer of a crumbled foundation nearby, indicating they were once planted in front of a home. I am struck by the fact that this rosebush and tulip tree that I’ve introduced to my own home landscape may well outlast us and our entire home and may indeed be our most lasting “legacy” on this patch of earth.

Step out onto the Planet

Draw a circle a hundred feet round

Inside the circle are

300 things nobody understands, and, maybe

nobody’s ever really seen.

How many can you find?

–Lew Welch