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First Shoots Unseen

The third Monday in January dawned with a cloudless blue sky and sun sparkling in the frost, “Blue Monday” so-called. Named by someone trying to sell something, I imagine a tonic, perhaps, or a pick-me-up.

And it is dark and still and cold. Everything is sleeping, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. But already since the solstice, days are getting a little longer, and life is stirring deep in the Earth.

You can’t see it with a cursory glance, but life is already preparing for its next round of growth.

And how? By nurturing small new beginnings in the dark quiet, gathering energy and nutrients from the soil and the teeming life within it, putting out tender feelers, probing for a way upward toward the light.

Growing things are not charging straight out into hard frost and bitter winds, unable to contain the impulse to grow immediately, without limits, as much as possible. Life gone wrong does that. Cancer cells do that.

But the trees, the grass, and the plants do not. They take their time unfurling into the new phase of being.

So should we.