I can feel nothing but joy with the gentle return of Spring weather, and today the breezes are away, the clouds hesitant, so the sun embraces you, unveiled and unrestrained. 

If you stand for a moment — and we rarely stand for even one moment — the whole of the reawakening world flows around and into you. The heat on closed eyelids and lips warms the skin, and somehow penetrates more deeply, as though the frequencies of light soothed and charged the cells of the body equally, from the outside in and from the inside out.

It is hearing the land's promise repeated: you will be fed, and the season will soften again. Everyone who pauses to hear that good news feels their own self soften as well.

I am reminded of a poem that was given to me a few years ago. My mentor in Cambridge was listening to my sadness as my marriage softly dissolved, listening to the work and the desire to cause a dream to continue, even after a long sleep was over, the new day at hand. I was in some way intent on holding what was, holding tightly with the mind and in that grasp clutching as well at my heart. I wouldn't let the sun arrive. And I wouldn't let the night depart.

There are movements of energy in this life against which you cannot stand, of course. Richard helped me return, again and again, to my own being, my own feeling, without making any judgment about right or wrong, action or inaction. The answers were always inside, so the practice was to be still so that they might speak.

And once I stilled, just as I stopped under the Spring sun today, I knew what I knew, and was warmed. Derek Walcott reached his heart into words, and wrote what he found. Richard gave me this poem when it had become clear, to my partner of many years and to myself, that the journey in close companionship had ended.

Love After Love
      
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.