Dark Times and Spring Gifts

In the last few months, I went through one of those dark nights of the soul.  Old anxieties and fears, and new anxieties and fears, disturbed my days and kept me from sleeping.  In my almost-hysterical, almost-involuntary looking-back, my faults, failings, and failures stood out starkly, causing me remorse and shame.  Eventually, by grace, some healing and humbling messages arrived for me.  During the later parts of that time, there also came various medical tests, which raised concerns, but eventually cleared the way for long-needed knee surgery, from which I’m recovering now.  And part of the direction to me in all of this, clearly, was: Slow down.  Stay still.  Stop worrying, stop judging, stop planning, stop looking anxiously behind and ahead.  Wait.

With difficulty, that’s what I’ve been trying to do lately.  Concentrating on healing, living a bit like a mole.  I’m waiting to see how the world appears to me when I can poke my head out again and look around.  I’ll see what I seem like to myself when I emerge from this burrow.  I’ll see what guidance comes to me in the new spring about what God wants from me.

In the meantime, though, I see no reason why I shouldn’t send Springtime greetings to you all.  Here’s something that will probably seem a little different for me.

On March 26, the results of the 15^th annual International COLOR (Photography) Awards were announced and presented live around the globe.  Six of my entered photos received prize Nominations and one of them an Honorable Mention.  One of the photos, though not taken recently, seems timely now, as Spring arrives and major league baseball revs up again.  This image was a Nominee in the Children of the World category.  I hope it’ll cheer you.  It’s called “Slugger”:

And I have another little gift for you.  In my last post, I talked about the great poets that Robert Bly translated into English.  One of those was the Norwegian poet, Rolf Jacobsen.  Here’s a poem of Jacobsen’s (translated by Bly) called “Sunflower”:

What sower walked over the earth,

which hands sowed

our inward seeds of fire?

They went out from his fists like rainbow curves

to frozen earth, young loam, hot sand,

they will sleep there

greedily, and drink up our lives

and explode it into pieces

for the sake of a sunflower you haven’t seen

or a thistle head or a chrysanthemum.

                        *                      *                      *

Let the young rain of tears come.

Let the calm hands of grief come.

It’s not all is evil as you think.