“Through the weeks of deep snow
we walked above the ground
on fallen sky, as though we did
not come of root and leaf, as though
we had only air and weather
for our difficult home.
But now
as March warms, and the rivulets
run like birdsong on the slopes
and the branches of light sing in the hills,
slowly we return to earth.”
~Wendell Berry

Sometimes what is happening can only be spoken by the poet. These days in which we find ourselves, these March days of thawing and rebirth, are just such days. Oh, we can read the weather reports. We can listen to long, drawn out descriptions of what it happening, but it really takes the poet to get to the marrow of the predicament.

A week ago Sunday, I read this poem of Wendell Berry to begin our worship together. We were not yet in a place of melting. People’s faces had that wounded,glazed look of too much winter. And yet they also shone forth their faithfulness, or stubbornness, by being present, by showing up though the easy and warmer thing to do would have been to stay in bed, pull the covers over their heads and go back to sleep. Sleep as a form of escape. We laughed at the word ‘rivulets’ then. Laughed at this beautiful word that flows, as it should, off the tongue. We laughed because it was not yet so and we had no hope yet in sight of when its presence might indeed flow, not only out our mouths, but down our hills, our sidewalks, our streets.

Now the laughter has turned to a kind of giddiness. Though the warmth is still a temperature that would make most of the country shiver, Minnesotans are taking these above freezing temperatures and opening them like gifts at a child’s birthday party. Short sleeves and even short pants can be seen everywhere. The puffy, down coats that we thought we could not face one more day have been abandoned.

And everywhere…..rivulets! Yesterday I sat all day in the round chapel at Koinonia Retreat Center on Lake Sylvia. The windows allow a nearly 360 degree view of forest, lake, and a landing strip for birds at both feeders and trees. All day long water, rivulets of melting snow, dripped down outside the window, baptizing us all with the spring that is arriving. The water was not only visible but audible. A slow sound of water running, splashing, coming out of its frozen form right before our eyes.

Like Wendell Berry, farmer and poet extraordinaire, I was reminded of the months when sky and earth had become one pattern of blue reflecting on white forming a swath of sameness. We walked upon it forgetting the earth that lay beneath, the earth from which we came and to which we will return, as we are reminded on Ash Wednesday. The winter months can keep us isolated from that deep knowing.

But now as the ground thaws and we begin to see the snow make way for the brown, gooey mud that will emerge, ‘slowly’ we return to the earth. The earth that will hold the seeds and the stalk, the footprint and the hope of yet another year of growth and beauty. We would not understand the fullness of this had it not been for the months of ‘walking on fallen sky’. We would not long for it so deeply if we had not known ‘weather as our difficult home’. Personally, I think it is all a part of some grand plan to keep us honest……grounded……grateful…..full of wonder. I know it works for me.

Today, may you be blessed with rivulets. May you say that word and love how it feels rolling off your tongue. May the pure loveliness of its letters making meaning fill you with hope for all that is yet to be as we ‘slowly return to earth’.