Spring is Alive

Spring is my favorite season. It is renewal, fresh air, excited hope, open possibilities. It's alive.

It's also usually my most restless season. After my first big fight with allergies for the year, usually involving a day or two down and a week regaining my normal strength and breath (and getting rid of that nagging cough!), I feel better than ever and I'm ready to take flight. I suppose I want to make up for lost time. It doesn't matter if I have a direction or not--the one I'm traveling at any given moment will do--I just want to go. To drive. To travel. To see or try something new. To move.

Spring is energy. The grass regains its color. Fresh flowers and leaves spring up everywhere, an embrace to the change of weather. Even the sky and clouds take on a new, fresher color and vibrancy. Then the storms come. Energy colliding in a wild dance with thousands of partners in the air. Bolts of energy create the light show; thunder provides the beat. Rain quenches the thirsty performers, and sometimes hail decorates the ground like confetti.

With so much energy, so much newness, it seeps into my skin and fills me up until I can't hold still. I have to move. I have to go somewhere. I have to join the dance and freshness and do something new. I long to bloom and grow like the trees and flowers surrounding me. I ache to whip by like the fluffy clumps of cotton in the sky. I'm ready to sing like the birds and make something beautiful that was not there before as the flora do.

And yet, I'm only beginning to learn, only just guessing at how to do this. I'm ready to go in every direction, without focus. Which means I usually don't go in any direction; I just explode wherever I stand, only to build up again the next day or the next week and repeat the cycle...until suddenly spring is over and I've yet again missed the opportunity I feel every year to join the world and bloom, grow, and stretch out.

I'm afraid. Afraid of making mistakes mostly, but also afraid of accomplishing or discovering grand things. If I find out I can, I may never stop. And what then? I won't want to go back to the wading pool I'm familiar with, even if it's safer, if I discover the ocean.

This year, I hope, will not be the exact same futile cycle. This spring, I hope I'm more willing to take chances, to see that the day is full and long and waiting, and to try. This time, even if I don't know all the steps, I'm going to join the dance.

I'm alive.