Saturday, March 19, 2011

Significance

The pinkletinks have returned.


Go ahead and turn your sound all the way up to hear their lovely chorus. Oh how I adore them. How my heart just fills with joy and I am swept away in waves of relief when I hear them. "I made it!" My sunlight-deprived soul cheers from under layers of fleece and under armor. Winter really is drawing to a close. The days get longer. The icy wind loses its bite. Seeds and meat birds are ordered. Gardens are tilled. Bikes are set free from their cobwebbed prison in the basement.
And we humans are freed from a winter's worth of navel-gazing. There is nothing like 4 solid months of staring at the same four walls, the same familiar faces, to magnify one's own stresses and problems, and distort them in fun house mirror fashion. (Though I may very well be as fat as I appear in the mirror. Holy crap, can my husband cook.)
This year feels particularly more stressful, for a variety of reasons. Things are changing. Things are unknown. But aren't they always? Didn't I feel this stressed last year? It's so hard to remember. But when I stand next to the newly tilled garden, listening to my peeping frog friends, and staring up at Orion, poised self-importantly in the night sky, I feel so wonderfully insignificant. So small. Such a tiny little part of this complex and giant universe, that functions beautifully regardless of my itty bitty existence.
And I think of the pinkletinks, who - so immersed in their own froggy existence, what with all the awakening and peeping and procreation at hand- have no awareness of us humans. Nor could they ever conceive of how much we look forward to their return from the murky depths each spring. How significant they are in my own feelings of insignificance.

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