Marshes and Marshwiggles

     At some point in my life, I lost my imagination. 

     I don't mean misplaced it temporarily, like I do my cell phone at least once a month. I lost the ability I had as a child to see the wonder and creativity with which God infuses even the most ordinary things in the world.  There have been times in the last year or two where this lost friend briefly sparked, drawing near with its light and warmth, only to grow dim yet again as the business of life dampened its glow.

      A recent hike through a swampy woods on a blustery, 50 degree day in Northern Michigan rekindled that spark.

    I'll be honest - this was not where I intended to be. My plan for the day involved an NBA game and a nice cup of Cherry Chocolate coffee while vegging on my sofa, but here I was on a trail hemmed in by barely budding trees and surrounded by lots of wintery grays and browns. I don't mind wearing clothes with those lovely earth tones, but if I had to be hiking, I expected more from Spring.

     The dullness and potential serenity of this woodsy jaunt could not restrain my 6-year-old caffeine-in-a-bundle, Vincent; his equally frenetic friend Marilee, who was at times literally a blur; and my 12-year-old son Braden, who gamely tried to keep up with the other two.  Vincent took the lead (as he reminded us again and again - "Stop! Wait! I'm the leader!").  Makeshift wooden gun in hand, he fearlessly led us through a gray/brown maze of lingering winter bursting with wolves, superheroes, villains, and invisible zombie giants, as Marilee screamed at...something, I'm not sure what.  Bugs, maybe.

    I must have absorbed some of their energy, because I soon realized this ordinary woods offered a smorgasbord of very cool things. Uprooted trees might not actually be zombie forts, but they were pretty awesome in their own right.  So as the kids screamed and wildly shot giants with their stick guns, I fired up the camera app on my first generation Droid phone and started to see the mystery and wonder of the woods.

     I kept halting their breakneck progress to take pictures; I couldn't help it. Hints of beauty poked through everywhere. Cold, clear streams trickled over smoothed pebbles and under fallen birch branches. Yellow marsh lilies pushed their way through the dead reeds of the slowly warming swamp, pressing against an aging wooden boardwalk.  Almost without my noticing, the child in me reignited a spark of creative life, seeing a late Spring work its miracle where before I had only seen winter's lingering weariness and decay.

April is the Cruelest Month

After visiting an area of Japan that was devastated by the March 2011 earthquake, Makoto Fujimura had this to say to Belhaven University students:

"As I was driven back to Tokyo… the Zao mountain range appeared beyond the clouds, with cherry blossoms in full bloom, enchanting the villages tucked away in the crevices between the mountains. It was hard to see scenes of such beauty—the trunks of the trees, with their wet-darkened bark—when the disaster was freshly etched in my mind. Thousands were still unaccounted for. My heart felt numb, and the beauty I saw seemed cruel.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

So begins T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, published in 1922. April is indeed cruel with the lilacs or the cherry blossoms at the peak of their beauty, invading the "memory and desire" of our ravaged hearts. We are awakened to horrors and terrors, but nature does not wait until we stop grieving. It moves on, as does the world, without empathy or knowledge of what really happened. My visit to Japan echoed Eliot's lament: beauty and trauma are forced to dwell together.

Today, you begin a new journey, and for you it is a bright April, full of hope. But we must also remember that for many April has been the "cruelest month." We must learn… to engage our creativity within the harsh confines of our broken world and the wide spaces of creating the 'World That Ought to Be.'"