Spring is Bitter/Sweet

The moon of spring waxes full, and round-bellied mares, feeling the lengthening daylight hours and the pull of the tides, bring forth their foals.

But spring is bitter/sweet.

At a friend's barn, a mare gives birth to a beautiful, healthy foal, gives her the precious colostrum-laden first milk, and then the mare falls to the ground, dead. Meanwhile, just a few miles away at the barn of a friend of this friend, a mare loses its newborn foal. Humans intervene to try to bring this mare and the orphaned foal together. If all goes well, these strangers will help each other to move forward in a patchwork of loss and need, of longing and fulfillment.

Spring, if you buy into the perennial hype of retailers and marketeers, is an orgy of joy and newness, of all things green and growing. All for your purchasing pleasure. But spring has its own price. There must be a balance, and the shadow of spring is sacrifice and surrender. Mother Nature invented recycling.

But spring is bitter/sweet. 

The full moon of spring brings an abundance of roadkill and tree frog songs. I get a phone call. A dear friend's cancer has returned with a vengeance. Though spring's promise of renewal feels hollow, hope for a miracle could take root in the fertile, dark earth of this, the  bitter/sweet season... 

I want to go to see my horse and breathe in her sweet, warm living fragrance.