We couldn’t figure out how Easter fell so early this year. What institution decides that? Not one to which I belong. I tend to belong here in the Northern wilderness, where God just speaks directly in the wind or a quiet voice or in a certain kind of stillness that happens when you gaze into the impossibly interconnected woods without adding words.  On Easter this year, deep snow remains on the ground, though it is melting from underneath in temperatures ranging from close to 50 degrees down into the low 30s. This gives the sensation of flow, of movement, of the fluidity of unimaginably endless molecules. And while the water is flowing beneath and amongst deep banks of snow, it still falls from above in huge flakes.

The more you look higher and higher to see the source of the flakes, the more of them there seem to be. Countless. The woods have a way of pointing out that flow is from above and going on below.

The trails still require snow shoes, and the snow is crusty on top in a misleading way, leading to occasional knee-deep submersion of feet and steps. This is what I call March snow, melting and refreezing, leaving a shell on top that fluctuates in its firmness according to the angle of the sun, time of day, and temperature. I went to the trail where the first bear usually crosses after hibernation, and something bigger had proceeded me, but probably not a bear.

The Oak leaves were falling sparsely in the late morning wind today on Easter. These are last year’s golden brown treasures. Oaks are infrequent in pine groves, but found on the further hilly trails.

Spring isn’t known for being the season of letting go, but the Oaks are a brilliant reminder and therefore teachers. They wait until the last minute, until they must let go, before dropping their leaves in Spring. We are like that most of the time, holding on like the Oaks to their leaves, until we must let go and make way for a new season, for newness itself, in Spirit, connection, purpose, path. The brown leaves drifting here and there above the deep white melting below are also part of the flow. Today they are framed atop the snow after gentle separation and landing, and soon they will disintegrate in the wet decay of the forest floor, giving nutrients to the brush and blueberry bushes and pines.

In the Balsam and Spruce groves adjacent to the swamp, the snow crust is covered with cones and cone parts, seeds, needles and twigs, magnetized to the earth and closing in on it as the snow beneath it melts. All of it will grow into something else, directly as another tree or indirectly as nutrients for all that is growing and feeding there. A month ago, this scene did not appear. Today, it is abundant.

The forest’s own unending resurrection.

This year the cattails in the Alder swamp clearing are bursting at the seams in large numbers, having recovered well from recent past years’ drought. They, too, stand firm and wait until they unpack themselves and let loose with promise. The deer brown cylinders of thousands of seeds explode out from the inside in hopeful and gradual expectation of new propagation. They wait until the right time and don’t care how unkempt or uneven they look as their transformation unfolds itself.

This is how the woods explain life and every season, including the first hint of Spring. The woods would tell us to calm down and forgive the unfolding of seasons and the holding on. Everything in its time, just as it is, now.