I grew up in the American Midwest where March was always the most unpredictable of months. In those days, the first crocuses and daffodils would emerge…..but they often ended up buried under the biggest snowstorm of the season — as if winter just couldn’t resist a final punch.

Some years ago, while living in Virginia, I visited Vermont in March. It was, as New Englanders say, “mud season.” I was invigorated by the cool weather, as well as by my interview at the amazing, nontraditional School of International Training (from which I subsequently received my MAT in English as a 2nd Language).

Upon my return to a more placid March in the south, I wrote a sort of paean to my joyful experience up north:

MUD SEASON - Margery Knott


Sometime in March, the wind
takes out her teeth and mumbles
new incantations over the land; she
unfastens her long gray locks and
lets her mane stream out like fingers that tease
the last tatters of snow 
into runnels and rivulets and unseen seepage,
working toward bedrock.
Oh, even without her sharpest bite
she stirs things up, the old witch!

Over her shoulder she sees the sun slipping
northward, and and the wind knows it’s now
or never
if she’s going to wake things up, if she’s going to
make it all possible
before he claims dominion; she’s got to
hustle fast.

She rolls up her sleeves and stretches
strong hands over the world.
And everything is breaking loose:
ice slabs rioting in the river,
mud on the road so deep it can
pull off your shoe — hell! it can
pull you in up to your knees so that
you have to wait until the neighbor
happens by with a tractor —
and even then
it’s no sure thing.

Once the flow starts, there aren’t too many
sure things — what with people sinking down
and rocks popping up: the biggest rocks
you can imagine breaching the surface like whales —
rocks big enough
to burst a tire or knock you right off the road
if you’re foolish enough to take the wheel when
the wind sets the world to flowing and
invites you into the dance.

Now it’s 2025 and, as I read this poem, I can’t help wondering if I can learn to find shreds of such hope and energy in the midst of the governmental mudslides that are currently ripping my country apart, threatening lives as well livelihoods & burying our foundational Constitution and the rule of law. Well, as the familiar quote attributed to Nietzsche says, “One must still have chaos within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” Dare I hope that the breaking up and cracking apart of the ice on which we’ve long been skating — thinking it will last forever — will fail to drown us? that we might imagine and learn a new way of moving?

In his thought-provoking book The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche (p. 189), the late mythsinger/storyteller Daniel Deardorff points out when something disrupts our habitual sense of logic “and the rock-solid facts of life disintegrate…– sinking in quicksand, one suddenly re-members ‘what matters‘ ….”

What truly matters most to you?
-- a good question for each of us to ponder--

So – – – it’s March. And I can’t help thinking about the delightful English idiom “mad as a March hare,” a saying derived from the odd leaps and sometimes pugilistic antics of hares during their mating season & meaning “crazy, deranged, violently out of control.” (For examples of folks to whom the phrase might apply, check out the news.). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E95_38I2h4

But it’s worth remembering that the March hares are “crazy” during their breeding season. What follows is new birth, new life. What is waiting to be born in our world? Can we make a difference? Can we base our new ways on what matters most?

As I reread this old poem, what I seem to be reminding myself is that I must stay alert — experiencing the chaos not as a reason to quit or to despair but as a source of energy into which we can tap to create something better. We are in the middle of a leap. Taking into account what truly matters to us, let’s be careful how & where we land.

Art by ANGELA HARDING –calendar illustration for March

Here in North Carolina, March is the time for early planting of many flowers and vegetables Add beauty by planting seeds for columbine, hollyhock, coreopsis, daisy, phlox, and dianthus. Begin growing food for the year — planting seeds of beets, carrots, kale, lettuce, Swiss chard, turnips, potatoes, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. Some plants — like tomato, eggplant, peppers — are not hardy enough to face possible late frosts, but you can still plant their seeds in the shelter of your home, keeping them safe until they grow strong enough to come out into the world.

What seeds are we planting today — not only in indoor pots & in backyard gardens, but in the larger “gardens” of our hearts & our cultures and of the wide, wild world?

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

~ Miguel De Unamuno ~
(Roots and Wings, edited and translated by Robert Bly)

What is my work? What is yours?

As Pete Seeger sang: “Step by step the longest march can be won...”

Wishing you a fertile March and a joyful march!