April is a month of renewal, rebirth. I always thought Carl Sandburg also called it the cruelest month as the Union soldiers, moving up through Maryland to Gettysburg, left their jackets and blankets on fenceposts to escape the sweltering heat only to shiver in the freezing temperatures a few nights later. I was mistaken. Instead AI tells me the following: "April is called the "cruelest month” the opening line of T.S. Eliot's 1922 poem, The Wasteland. It is considered cruel because it breaks the "numbness" of winter, forcing life and growth out of the dead land, which brings painful memories and desires back to a world that feels deadened and shattered.” Except for the repetition of “deadened”, not a bad description of the renewal of life after the ‘deadening' blast of winter.
The brilliance of daffodils has graced our landscapes, borders, and garden corners surviving freezing temperatures far better than those poor soldiers in the Civil War (even though the poem was not written about them, Carl Sandburg did describe their suffering in some poem somewhere.) And a bounty of flowers - emboldened by the daffodils - have come leaping out of the ground, buds opening full on bushes and trees alike. Blinding yellow displays of forsythia, colorful displays of tulips, bleeding hearts. Nature’s life force bursting forth in spring as birds nest, animals prepare for their young.
And this immediacy of grace - the fundamental creativity of reality - can lift our spirits, remind us of the stability of nature in the midst of such horrendous happenings around the country and the world. We might remember that the Buddha encouraged placing our awareness on the body before the mind as the body was slower to change. The lightening speed of our changing thoughts, feelings, moods leaves us with no footing. And the news keeps those changes churning. The body comes to rest as we breath in and breath out and our rest deepens and the breath slows and we can take refuge in those slower rhythms. We can use that refuge to calm and restore, to replenish from the spring of our own deepest well, to touch into the equanimity that lets us know we can’t control everything and neither can anyone else - neither can anyone else, that allows us to flow gently with the unfolding of our experience, to understand the earth can absorb the willfulness of mankind and will continue its revolutions around the sun unabated by the worst humanity has to throw at it.
Remembering the beautiful verse I shared a week or so ago from the The Dhammapada, translation* by Gil Fronsdal:
All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a corrupted mind,
And suffering follows
As the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox.All experience is preceded by mind,
Led by mind,
Made by mind.
Speak or act with a peaceful mind,
And happiness follows
Like a never departing shadow.