Happy Passover and Easter! This holiday weekend, I’m in a happy, yet contemplative mood. I look back on my New Year’s resolutions and while I’ve completed some, I’m still working on others. The promise of spring is that it’s still early enough in the year to make my resolutions and dreams come true. Or I can change my mind, push the reset button, and start anew.

What is spring to you?

To Emily Dickinson, spring was madness, and so she wrote this:

A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own! 

T.S. Eliot, in The Waste Land wrote:

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.” 

To those living in America’s northeast or Europe’s north, this month must be especially cruel. One day keeps the promise of spring and the next brings winter back again. But nature is forever optimistic. Crocus buds shoot through the snow to toward the light. Bluebirds find a new (or old) home to birth their young. And pileated woodpeckers, squared off in a shouting match, call and drum, then listen for the other to respond.

10447874_10152272367081843_321612176003547025_n bluebird outside bird house from timeline

One cannot help but feel joyful in the spring. Even Hemingway, who was never the consummate optimist, said in A Moveable Feast:

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.” 

I know it’s spring when I have this innate urge to dig in the dirt. This week, I’m busy planting pots full of succulents, in keeping with California’s fourth year of drought. Getting down to earth, I close with Margaret Atwood in Bluebeard’s Egg:

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” 

About the Author: Lois and Günter Hofmann lived their dream by having a 43-foot ocean-going catamaran built for them in the south of France and sailing around the world. Learn more about their travel adventures by reading Lois’s award-winning nautical adventure trilogy. Read more about Lois and her adventures at her website and stay in touch with Lois by liking her Facebook page. Lois’s books can be purchased from PIP Productions on Amazon and on her website.