Happy First Day of Spring

Hurrah! It's the first day of Spring. Winter slips under the sill of brightness and green opens everywhere. I finish up my garden planting this week, a wave of cosmos, morning glories, tomatoes, zinnias, larkspur, and sunflowers, the black seeds buried, waiting for transformation.

On Pacific Avenue, the cherry trees wear sea foam blossoms, palest pink; I went to my usual Wednesday Peets noon writing session today--decaf coffee, not Irish Breakfast or Russian Caravan, and a chocolate-dipped biscotti. The homeless man who always says his mother is Grace Kelly, over and over, had just walked out, and a woman with beautiful silver hair stood next to me in line.

Bleary-eyed from dank dreams over the past two nights of a person I once knew, coming to me in dreamscapes to torment and harm, I needed to sit and write, to exorcise the slime of nightmare from my day. We were friends during a time such as this, when spring opened like a heart of light over the redwoods, ocean, creeks, and ponds of this coastal town. This was a friend who finally showed his true nature, as if he were a beloved tree growing for years in my sight, going through seasons of rain and sun, until suddenly the rotten center was revealed, a core of degradation. I remind myself that this person does not have the power to harm me or my family anymore. I remind myself that this person is one of the "still suffering" ones in this world, trapped in a nightmarescape.

So, I drank coffee today, unhurried, wrote with turquoise ink--the same ink I've been writing with since I was eighteen years old--filling three more pages of my Morning Pages journal. Grateful to have slipped out from under a frozen cloak of winter, grateful for one more season alive on this earth, grateful for the presence of love and good things in my life. How quickly the most murky picture changes with gratitude's slightest touch.