A Fierce Peace

Steady lessons in a chaotic culture

We demand so much of poor March. The equinox arrives, we whip out our smartphones, and tap the weather app: our winter-pale faces illuminated by the glow of our little oracles. “It will be fifty tomorrow!” we feverishly, frothingly declare. We eye our gardening tools and put the heavy winter coats away in their trunks. Lured by the promises of warm weather we step outside expecting fields of golden daffodils and instead find ice underfoot. We check the modern oracles again. A snowstorm is promised to arrive by week’s end. This is when the stages of grief set in. “This can’t be right. It will blow past us. South of here.” we deny. Later that day we angrily throw the final wood from our pile down through our cellar doors to the stove. Perhaps we pray or just clench our fists and declare that we’d happily take another week of dire mud or slither-slick rain if it meant buds and blooms the following day. We give in. We’re burnt out. Winter has been long this year and maybe it’s best to just take a few days off and do nothing. Then, the spring in our own hearts finally arrives and we accept our lot as creatures of this earth. We know the good green pattern is beneath the late March snow pushing, pushing, ever pushing gently but surely through.

March is volatile and capricious. Despite this, year after year, it always plays the same tricks. It is volatile but it is predictably volatile; it teases us with warmth, retreats into cold, stretches the thinning veil between seasons at the thresholds. We too are consistent; we fall for these tricks every single year and every single year we go a little mad with green-ache longing for life to spring forth. This annual gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair at the bait-and-switch of March is our own fault however, a symptom of living in our wounded modern world. The predicable challenges of muddy roads, of lingering snows, of sleet-gray skies become a monotonous purgatory in a culture that demands instant results while offering chemical and virtual escapes. The glow of screens promises weather updates, the hum of traffic pushes us forward, the expectation that spring should arrive on our terms endures. We should not escape however. This capriciousness is to be embraced with a knowing nod and weathered smirk. We know we will have to wait.

By this time of the year however, waiting for all the good green things has left us weary. Wait-weary. Winter-weary. The snow is barely holding on to the last shadows in the forest, the days have stretched on beckoned by the equinox fires, but the full bloom of renewal—the first real boom of green—is elusive. This waiting drives us mad. Again, however, it shouldn’t; the madness is a symptom of the culture we inhabit. If your culture demands productivity always, then it sees waiting as a failure. The earth makes us wait though and the season teaches us to trust the process if we are but willing to listen. We pace the gardens eager to break the frost. We look to the bird houses eager for signs of life. We stand at our thresholds straining our ears for the hint of spring peepers. It is useless. Better to walk the wood line of the field again, to wait, to breathe and say “Calm, dear heart. Soon. Soon. Soon.” This patience is a virtue modernity has forgotten but the good green pattern insists we reclaim.

Our culture—the wounded neon modern world—urges us to never wait, to rush, to solve idleness. We can buy industrial greenhouse-grown flowers, we can curse the snow, we can live unmoored from the earth. We can return, however. Take a breath, stand in the mud by the red dogwood, wait under barren trees. Close your eyes. When they open, they may just spy a robin or bluebird in the field. They may see snow coming over the hills. Whatever the case may be, the earth will unfurl on its own terms. You may recoil at aligning with its rhythm, it may feel like surrender as you wait. It is not surrender though. It is alignment. It is harmony. Through this, we release our demands and begin a rooted rebellion against the cultural clamor, find a fierce peace that steadies us until we too can only be moved on our own good terms.