Daily Riches

Snow in April. My first reaction is to complain, to grump about snow when there's a garden outside, warming and just beginning to breathe.

Snow blows across the yard, and I bow my head, self-condemned, telling myself, today is an INSIDE day. Ho-hum and blah.
Add to this a vague sense of heaviness that has built within me for the past few days, a seed of dread in the middle of me, seeping slowly up my arms and down my legs. I push it away in the business of a day but in moments of silence I realize it is still present, dull and heavy as a peach pit lodged in my chest.

Snow. HUM BUG. Snow in April.

But then I attempted to capture the ludicrous BLAH by snapping some pictures. The images were blocked by the glass and the screen, and so I unlocked the windows and slid them down in their casements. The flurries, so busy and hectic when blocked by the glass, silently and gently danced over the deep green grass. I heard the creek chuckling at the joke of snow; the cold breeze teased the warm heavy air of our house.

Inside, my geraniums bloomed far above the fray, promising quietly that indeed spring did come, and is here despite the flurries.

My inner weight is not gone. But all right, and all right and all right. The world dances on despite me, and I choose to reach out of my gloom and acknowledge the goodness. There, I've held it. Snow, a white blossom, the riches of a day.

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.
--Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (19)