As the sun shifts north, as warm days become more common and flowers leap into life, I’ve been thinking about the ways we humans have looked at and integrated ourselves with the seasons of this Earth to which we belong. On Friday, I learned that the Japanese have — with the same careful, subtle gaze as in Haiku — divided the year in 72 micro-seasons. Yesterday I learned that the name of this time (the 7th micro-season, March 6-10) is

“Hibernating Creatures Open Their Doors”


The words resonated within me like a large, deep gong: 
 a summons, 
a challenge,
an invitation to step out into the light,
to take part in the ever-changing world.

During the last months, I have spent far too many days curled up in my den — filled with anxiety, grief, anger, fear, and despair as I learn more & more about both the increasing human destruction of Earth and the rise of authoritarianism around the world. Here in the U.S., the latter is a real & increasing threat as one man holds us and our government hostage to his megalomania, offering “divine salvation” to his followers and violence to those who dare to question him.

As many of you know, I lived for 5 years under a dictatorship. I went to Tripoli, Libya, to teach in an American school in 1969 — arriving just a couple weeks before the coup that put Muammar Gaddafi into power. Indeed, as I stepped out the door on Monday, September 1, ready for the first day on school, my neighbor called over the wall: “No school today. There’s a revolution.” I laughed and said, “I’ll bet you always say that to first year teachers.” But no — it was true.

I won’t go into all the details here. Let me just say that when Trump was elected in 2016, I began to suffer from PTSD as my body remembered the kinds of things that happen under a dictatorship, the things that had happened to me personally and the more general things such as, by government degree, spending hours with a black marker crossing out every mention of or reference to Israel in our teaching materials. (You can, I am sure, imagine my reaction to the banning of books that is currently happening in some parts of this country.)

I am not saying that these past months have been without light. The metaphorical den I dug was not without windows. The beauties of the more-than-human continued to give me joy & relief — the dawn behind the bare-boned filigree of winter trees, the deer that came to graze below our house on one of my most difficult days, and always the birds, the birds, the birds. And the human world, too, reached out to me in many ways, even when my back was turned — Synchronicities kept calling me home to myself with increasing frequency.

As John O’Donohue says so beautifully in To Bless the Space Between Us:

“Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The gray perished landscape is shorn of color. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are wakening up. Colors are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bud opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of color emerges.

The beauty of nature insists on taking its time. Everything is prepared. Nothing is rushed. The rhythm of emergence is a gradual slow beat always inching its way forward; change remains faithful to itself until the new unfolds in the full confidence of true arrival. Because nothing is abrupt, the beginning of spring nearly always catches us unawares. It is there before we see it; and then we can look nowhere without seeing it.

Change arrives in nature when time has ripened.”

[O’Donohue also says…]

“But change is difficult for us. So often we opt to continue the old pattern, rather than risking the danger of difference. We are also often surprised by change that seems to arrive out of nowhere.

We find ourselves crossing some new threshold we had never anticipated. Like spring secretly at work within the heart of winter, below the surface of our lives huge changes are in fermentation. We never suspect a thing. Then when the grip of some long-enduring winter mentality begins to loosen, we find ourselves vulnerable to a flourish of possibility and we are suddenly negotiating the challenge of a threshold.”

So here I am at a threshold, deciding to emulate both the plants and my fellow hibernating animals, to open the door, to emerge — hungry and ready to grow, ready to create once again.