Sitting At The Tipping Point Between Seasons

My feet are covered

Warm socks and blanket soft

Outside the storm’s rage

This time of year, sitting at the tipping point between seasons, I waver between melancholy and expectation. It’s a time of change, of emerging, and of energy. I feel that hope within. But I will miss the long night, the warm blanket engulfing me, me with my old shabby sweatshirt and plaid pajama pants reading, me with a solitary lamp lit over my shoulder, and two pups watching me atop their own heated blanket stretched over a well-worn couch. Me, with coffee in hand, watching snow fall outside my window.

This morning birds sing

Spring buds on empty branches

Hope returns to me

This time of year, sitting at the tipping point between seasons, the wee signs of spring are most propitious. Nature’s hair stylist has popped in for the first touch up. Green-tipped shoots off a wild brunette head of branches – nature’s balayage – with its neck plunging into the chest of earth, its bronchi of roots breathing in, and breathing out. Tree tinting. Nature’s pintura.

Spring’s latest style.

I owe Ten Thousand

Tears for Ten Thousand Species

Extinctified. Gone.

This time of year, sitting at the tipping point between seasons, peeping out of our winter caves, humanity in general must wonder, as do I, how many birds made it. How many bears? How many species still exist? Will exist, ten years hence, much less ten thousand years from now. God’s winter is no match for Humanity’s hot all-season climate disaster. We know how to speed up the cycle of species extinction. We know this well. We aren’t God but we play God, don’t we? So long, monarch butterflies. Hasta giraffes, you long-neckers.  Ta ta bumblebees, and coral reefs. You’re all goin’ down, thanks to us.

Walking in deep snow

Stepping into prior steps

Feeling fortunate

This time of year, sitting at the tipping point between seasons, paths are still snowy on the higher trails but it is likely that others have broken the way before us. Down where I live, the snow has melted, but other, wiser ones have broken metaphorical passages before me. The world is birthing once more. The way forward is the way…forward.

But you, little bird, on green-tipped branch, have my full attention just now.

Timely timeless time

The hour with you is endless

This endless moment

Credits:

Photos and Haikus by Michael Kroth