SPRING IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY

The Valley? Yes, it is sprung! The landscape is alive with vibrant colors and the bouquet of nature’s finest perfumes. I nearly weep with joy at each breath of it. By and large it is an affirmation for me, in that I often think of how intrinsically twined our capacity for happiness is with the features of reality that made us as we are. If we are not surely sprung from the earth then how can we feel as we do in the spring of the year? The annual rebirth of the flowers and trees is, after a fashion, a kind of proof to me that any sane discussion of “creation” must begin before the particles of existence exploded in a big bang, before the everlasting moment when they were all in such perfect harmony that they might fit on the head of a pin as there was nothing to separate them, and that all that has occurred since that time is merely a cascading panorama of seamless circumstance with each event absolutely dependent upon its predecessor. Like the dogwood and the magnolia, we live and we die, we rot and are reborn in a perpetual parade of incarnations, slave to the munificence of the cosmos.