The Beautiful Mystery of Cycles and Seasons.

Spring is the most special season of the year for me.  I confess that Autumn is also alluring in its beauty. But its clamour of martial colours precede sleep and death, leading us into the cold darkness of winter.  The colours of spring in their sharp freshness and vividness are all about light and birth , leading to the fullness and warmth of summer.  It's this sense of joyful awakening, the movement of life stirring again and the energy that fills one at this time of year; that's what I love.  So good to get out of doors, to see the lighter days, hear the birds and the bees again.  I feel as if I too have been asleep, feel like Rip Van Winkle emerging, yawning, wondering where time has gone.

Just now my garden is filled with wonderful delicate flowers,the leaves swept from the lawn and flower beds, the earth rich, brown and malleable.  From my window I see masses of yellow forsythia, pink and white cherry blossoms and those exquisite tiny tender green leaves beginning to burst forth and race along the stark and solemn winter branches.  Yesterday, I saw a beautiful bright yellow Brimstone butterfly. Today, a Peacock butterfly. In ancient Greek the butterfly was called Psyche, or Soul.   Butterflies . . . souls freed from their earthy chrysalis prison, darting about.   Persephone is allowed out of Hades and the realms of her dark, forbidding lord.  She's dancing everywhere and flowers spring up around her feet.

The passage of time marked by the equinoxes and solstices were very important to the ancient Celts.  It was a time much revered by the Celts who named the time of vernal equinox Imbolc.  I too revere it, the tremendous outburst of energy as sap rises in the tree trunks, stiff shoots poke up from the dark earth once more, revel in the mystery of renewed life each year.  It brings hope and faith that life, when all is said and done, is a continuing cycle where nature repeats herself but is never ever quite the same.

Human history also follows cycles and in the same way, nothing is ever quite a repetition but always a unique, ever changing statement of something that always remains the same.  Wars, floods, plagues, times of plenty and times of deprivation have been with us since biblical times.  Yet we always marvel as if they have never occurred before.