Hal Borland for today:
"March Winds" ~ March 8th
The winds of March are as inevitable as the vernal equinox, and they can be as variable as the moods of the season. They can be as cold as February, as warm as May. They can bring snow, and they can bring flocks of birds from the Southland. But fundamentally, March wind is the dying breath of winter, the first triumphant gasp of spring. It is clearing of the air. It may howl or whisper, soothe or punish, but it is the wind of change, the voice of seasons in transition.
March winds act as they do because they come down from the still frigid Arctic and up from the steadily warming tropics. Vast weather systems are marching across the land and when they meet, as they do here in the Northeast in March, strange things happen. March weather is the counterpart of the storms that so often accompany the autumn equinox. But in autumn it is the surge of oncoming winter beating back the rearguard of summer. Now it is on the other way around. Winter is on the defensive and will be routed in the end.
So we take the buffeting and the comforting as they come, as we take mud and ice, cold rain and melting snow knowing they are a part of March. We often wish they weren't. But before we can have spring, winter must be torn to tatters. And that is what happens by the time March has blown itself out. March is no picnic, or even a time for one, but it isn't blowing December our way. It is blowing us right into April, and May, and summer.
The winds of March are as inevitable as the vernal equinox, and they can be as variable as the moods of the season. They can be as cold as February, as warm as May. They can bring snow, and they can bring flocks of birds from the Southland. But fundamentally, March wind is the dying breath of winter, the first triumphant gasp of spring. It is clearing of the air. It may howl or whisper, soothe or punish, but it is the wind of change, the voice of seasons in transition.
March winds act as they do because they come down from the still frigid Arctic and up from the steadily warming tropics. Vast weather systems are marching across the land and when they meet, as they do here in the Northeast in March, strange things happen. March weather is the counterpart of the storms that so often accompany the autumn equinox. But in autumn it is the surge of oncoming winter beating back the rearguard of summer. Now it is on the other way around. Winter is on the defensive and will be routed in the end.
So we take the buffeting and the comforting as they come, as we take mud and ice, cold rain and melting snow knowing they are a part of March. We often wish they weren't. But before we can have spring, winter must be torn to tatters. And that is what happens by the time March has blown itself out. March is no picnic, or even a time for one, but it isn't blowing December our way. It is blowing us right into April, and May, and summer.
I plan on disseminating much more commentary on the topics of religion and spirituality (especially with regards to modern educational debates over evolution and creationism), but for now let it suffice to say that the central, underlying message of Easter is True. As were the spring-time pagan rites that preceded it and upon which it was based. It is a popular misconception among fundamentalists that somehow Christianity erased all that came before it. Just as it is a profound misunderstanding of mythology to assert that disproving the "facts" of a particular story somehow hangs a canopy of doubt over the entire enterprise of related beliefs. Both perspectives commit the cardinal sin of literality.
Reading Borland's editorial, is it any wonder that the ancients cast the elements in the roles of warring gods? I don't care how many Doppler radar systems we have trained on the atmosphere. For all our technological sophistication - our attempts to murder by dissection - the essence behind these primordial forces remains intact and unknowable.
And how about the line that claims, "March wind is the dying breath of winter"? Is there anything more hopeful, more deeply attractive to our core instincts than the notion that the season of death is not the end? Death, too, can be conquered. Death, too, can die.
And if that's true, well, then the sky's the limit.
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