"We have endured
The Order of Winter
The Hunger
The Winds
The Pain of Sickness
And lived on…..
Once again we shall
See the Snow melt
Taste the Flowering Sap
Touch the Budding Seeds
Smell the Whitening Flowers
Know the Renewal of Life."
(found beside a Boreal Forest display at the Museum of Man and Nature, Winnipeg, Manitoba.)
 

It is a time of revelation in Minnesota. As the sun shines and the temperatures warm, the multiple inches of snow has been melting slowly into the thawing ground. We are glad for this slow melt as it lessens the chance of spring floods in those areas prone to rising waters. But as the snow melts the great reveal begins.

 This revealing consists of all those things captured and held suspended in the layers of snow and ice over the winter months. Last week on my walks I saw many interesting items that are emerging from the snow. Aluminum cans of various brands and in a multiplicity of forms: flattened, ripped in jagged shreds, full and empty. Wrappers of all kinds: candy, gum, potato chip bags, a sliver of gummy bear bag, many tossed plastic bags from a variety of chain stores. Items once found in the mouth: gum, chewed and now thawing to present a walking hazard, cigarettes, some still intact as if the sign of a kicking the habit moment, others fully smoked down to the filter. Clothing: a pair of jeans, a stray tennis shoe, a once white t-shirt now mutilated by car tires, a blue t-shirt flat as a pancake but in good condition. A fully preserved pigeon, feathers still glittering oil slick colors, lying within the thawing snowbank as if it had made its nest there and was only sleeping. Not far from the pigeon, a pink pacifier, lost to its no-doubt anxious owner.

These treasures I noticed caused me to wonder about what else might be revealed as these days of winter melt into the new birth of spring. What are the things in my life that have been hidden beneath the ice and snow of this winter? What parts of my living have been frozen in time waiting to be picked up and tossed as the waste it now is? Or what is waiting to be found, washed, cared for and nurtured back to life? Like the pink pacifier owner, what have I,perhaps, outgrown? If we are awake and aware,these revelations of melting can bring great change, new life.

The slow melt will continue over the next several days. We've even been promised an early rain which will begin the clean up toward spring's greening. But before we get to that point, perhaps it is wise to take stock of what is being revealed. With eyes wide open our spring might take on a whole new dimension that could make all the difference in our lives and in the life of the world. 

As I understand the season of Lent, that is really the point.