I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.
                                                                                                 Alice Walker

We’ve finally arrived in April. In a couple of weeks, the daffodils will begin to bloom in our front yard, and the first bright yellow dandelions will pop open behind the house. The forsythias will be first–maybe as soon as next Sunday?  But I can’t wait for the moment when the first daffodil breaks through its luminescent green casing, opening up pale yellow to reveal an orange center.

In spring, I keep taking short walks around our yard and down the street just to see what will happen next. The small wild strawberry flowers. The green buds of bushes opening into curled leaves. The leaves of the violets coming up out of the bare ground where I thought they might have perished in the fall. And down the road, the first fiddleheads of the ferns beginning to poke through the ground that a day ago had been fern-less.

This awakening seems to happen all at the same time. This week there are the bare branches and brown grasses, and then suddenly, everything will be green and lush and colorful. How do they know to break through, all in the same week? It helps me to understand what I have read about evolution—that species co-evolved with each other. That flowers emerged along with their pollinators, and each flower with its particular pollinator, so interdependent that we do them a sort of injustice to think of them as separate entities.

And of course, the insects will also come out with the flowers here in the spring, small ground bees hovering over the grass as if waking from a long sleep. The hummingbirds will arrive when the pink flowers of the viburnum open near our kitchen window. When the buds begin to get ready, it is our signal to put out the feeder, so we can join in.

All around us, like a choreography of dance, like a vast symphony, the beings of the earth move in harmony. And in this particular time of the year, this beautiful season of awakening, we can see it and hear it and smell it and feel it, if we pay attention. We can feel the threads of connection that make of many beings, one indivisible whole.