April Showers

The landscape changes every day this time of year. I am amazed at how more leaves have really begun to pop this week. For awhile it felt like spring was unfolding so slowly. But now I feel like everything has sped up. And today the much needed

are creating those iridescent neon greens that I love to see this time of year.

Looking out at the pond this morning I saw beauty everywhere I looked. Several gold finches perched in the hydrangea tree outside my office window. It seemed as if they were just asking to be photographed in all their golden beauty.

I am hoping to get out in the woods with my camera for awhile this afternoon, hopefully between rain showers. It’s been more than a week since I located a pileated woodpecker nest in Big Willow Park. I’d like to go back there with my 100-400mm lens and see if I can get some closeups of these beautiful birds.

Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

These days of neon green are fleeting and spring will unfold into summer before you know it. So I savor each moment of these resurrection days aware that they will not last. The seasons turn ever forward.

Moccasin Flowers

All my life,
so far,
I have loved
more than one thing,

including the mossy hooves
of dreams, including’
the spongy litter
under the tall trees.

In spring
the moccasin flowers
reach for the crackling
lick of the sun

and burn down. Sometimes,
in the shadows,
I see the hazy eyes,
the lamb-lips

of oblivion,
its deep drowse,
and I can imagine a new nothing
in the universe,

the matted leaves splitting
open, revealing
the black planks
of the stairs.

But all my life—so far—
I have loved best
how the flowers rise
and open, how

the pink lungs of their bodies
enter the fore of the world
and stand there shining
and willing—the one

thing they can do before
they shuffle forward
into the floor of darkness, they
become the trees.

— Mary Oliver