Blustery raw wind, gray sky, cold.  But I’m glad, because it’s raining.  Not snowing.  Raining.

All the gutters and downspouts are trickling, cutting channels through the grungy continents of ice now going soft and grainy everywhere.  Dark and muscular, our river fills its bed from bank to bank, rumbling under the bridge and carrying melted snow from Minnesota to Mississippi.  The pebbly frozen shallows stamped with goose tracks are covered now.  Birds hurl themselves into puddles, shouldering water headfirst up over their churning wings, ecstatic.  Water surges over ground struggling to absorb it all.

This is how change arrives.  This is how the world is reborn, in Theodore Roethke’s words, as we quiver, lean to beginnings.  In motion and transformation, the world is praying to itself, and to that mystery which moves us all.  

Here it comes, that new thing, whatever it is going to be.

Amen.  Amen.