It may be the line of bold yellow forsythia that appears on a drab brown hillside. It may be the sudden burst of crimson red on a stand of maple trees in the park or the cottony white and pink of blossoms on dozens of apple trees in an orchard where gnarled dark branches dominated just last week. When spring’s color arrives, it feels like a quick entrance in a door.

Spring comes calling with invitations, in the blossoms, bursting buds, and blooms. Their message is clear: Come, don’t waste the moment. Look now. Enjoy this. Spring explodes in color bursts in the woodlands and along the streets that seem to exclaim a gay and riotous party that will soon settle down into summer’s hanging-around fullness. Many of its moments are brief and exquisitely pleasing and beautiful.

Take the rapturous show of crabapple blossoms. The tree’s color captures the juxtaposing messages of spring beauty that comes and leaves quickly but encourages us to slow our pace to savor it. First, its buds swell in the balloon stage into showy red-purple, pink, or white. Once the buds break, its delicate blossoms of pinkish white, light pink, rose-pink, and other variations burst forth. The flowering lasts just one to two weeks before a tree changes over to leaves. There is no waiting once this happens. Is there anything that expresses the beauty of a singular moment like the pink of crabapple blossoms against the deep blue sky or smooth water?

Spring possesses the quality of insistence in new life. The bud lies dormant through a winter’s long dark hours and its icy frozen days. Encased in each bud during the winter are the makings of the shoots, blossoms, blooms, and leaves of the following season. With increasing sunlight and warmer temperatures returning, that which the bud holds quickens and the bud bursts through. Its insistence in new life is based on natural cycles, regardless of our own sense of time and our life’s rhythms of growth and loss. Spring speaks of renewal, whether we are attentive and admiring, preoccupied, or deep in grief.

In this annual resurgence spring’s new growth and color tell us to trust that life comes forth in ways that we can depend upon. The new growth is a culmination of natural forces of the sun and earth’s rhythms, temperature and the soil. So it makes perfect sense in the natural world. But we also know it as a miracle to our senses and to our souls, one all the more glorious when we are open to its daily, seemingly sudden invitations found on hillside, lane, and pathway. The season doesn’t wait so it is up to us to follow the when and the where. Yes, spring has come calling!

Spring Explorations

Each year, Mindful Walker has focused on walking in the city, town, and country to find spring’s beauty and exuberance. To further explore spring on Mindfulwalker.com, take a look at the following:

The Glorious Palette of Spring Green

A Date With the Blossoms in New Paltz

Springtime at the Irish Hunger Memorial