There is a window in early spring that lasts maybe ten days. The snow is gone but the leaves are not out yet. The forest is more open than it will be for the rest of the year. You can see further through the trees. Trails that felt enclosed in summer feel wide and exposed. The sky is suddenly visible from places where, in two weeks, a canopy will block it entirely.
I walked through this window last week and it struck me how vulnerable the forest looks right now. Bare. Exposed. Everything that was hidden by leaves and snow is suddenly visible: the shape of the land, the fallen trees from winter storms, the way the creek actually moves through the terrain instead of just the sound of it behind a wall of green.
There is something uncomfortable about this kind of visibility. I think it is the same discomfort most people feel about their own in-between moments. The time after you have let go of something but before the new thing has arrived. The gap between the old and the next. We rush to fill it. We want the leaves back.
But the forest does not rush. It sits in the open for as long as it needs to. The thaw takes exactly as long as the thaw takes. And in that exposed, vulnerable, in-between time, something essential is happening underground. Roots are reaching. Buds are forming. The whole system is gathering energy for what comes next.
Let it be spring at its own pace this week.
Steven
