Throughstone #23: Sap in Our Veins

It’s that season when resurgence is slightly gray and muted, but inevitability pushes upward while every intertwined mass of roots awakens under our feet, with equal measures of confidence and stealth. What happens underground is soon signalled by a barely audible pulsing of color, pale at first and then flushed with chlorophyll. 

This spring’s ritual follows the darkest of wintry moments when the weight of ice surpassed recent memory. Eventually, thankfully, the heaviness began to take its toll, and dead and dying branches began to fail. Branches of division and the division of branches – all of the  over-extended arms of government that had reached beyond acceptable limits could no longer weather their own malevolent gales.

While winter seldom bears responsibility for our lonesome doubts, it can stretch them further than we thought possible, like a pizza-maker’s glutinous twirlings. Every year, spring melts those doubts and subtly commands our attention. Still creatures of habit and season, we succumb to the murmurings of optimism, the demands of uprising. The sap in our veins rises until bud-break cracks like a whip, over and over again, from hill to hill, shaking us awake from the nightmarish possibilities of power, back again to the powers of possibility. 

As the dark and dank memories eventually mat themselves into the detritus of centuries past, we will find sustenance in the decay and comfort in the elixirs of resurgence. Ice always melts, and winter belongs to no one. Spring belongs to everyone. Beware, with green comes fierce mirth.

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“Throughstone 250” is a purposefully constrained blog project. As a long-winded Southerner constrained by Vermont’s limited porch season and the Yankee penchant for paragraphs of three words or less, I’ve opted to aim for semi-regular (i.e., consistent in their irregularity) reflections of precisely 250 words for the foreseeable future.

250 means something right now. Maybe more than we anticipated. It’s symbolic but incredibly important…and a 250 word count seems much less constrained than a 5-7-5 syllable count for a haiku. 

Like many others, I’m struggling to make meaning out of these tumultuous days. I’ve always found it useful to try and write my way out of tough spots. Looking for throughstones is just one more effort to try and generate some meaning from the mayhem.