This music—when the alder and maple drop their icy lace handkerchiefs on the soft mud beneath Sol's melting gaze—songs made of streams and cast-off shells, over then under frozen ledges layered and fractured as mica.
This music sings me into silence. No sound but my slow inhale, exhale—I hold still, even when a pebble, frost-heaving down an embankment, splashes, startling me. It's Spring, the creek is playing, tumbling, singing its thawing. So am I.
Amanda Slater, "Dicksonia antarctica, Circinate vernation," 2014
The compost disassembling under fiddlehead leaves, sighing out our collective breaths held since last winter—stretching unfurling croziers to shepherd us from chores to mysteries. Look how the mist rises before sunup, washes out all the color from the gifts I brought you: the lump of sweet butter shaken from cream, jade horns opening from a mat of pixie cup lichens, a loose scrub-jay feather carrying the summer sky. Let's set our old bones on fire, make ourselves a joy- filled crucible for the bud-break post-vernation.
