Daffodil Reminders

There are times of dormancy. Winter. Stasis. Treading water. When I have to remind myself that I’m living life and not just waiting around for the Next Thing. I watch the daffodils raise up out of the dirt and put their faces toward the sun. It’s an object lesson, isn’t it?

Just above the daffodils, the birds fly through my parents’ backyard, stopping in at the feeders for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Redwing blackbirds, redheaded woodpeckers, wrens, blue jays, sparrows, pigeons, doves. Those are the ones I recognize.

The female redwing blackbirds travel in flocks. Twenty there. Thirty over there. Another fifty scattered around. On the warm days, they shrug themselves down into the birdbaths and fling water droplets up into the air around them like orbed jewels. Where do they go when they’re not here, in this oasis of a garden? Where do they sleep at night?

The squirrels fuss at the dog who keeps them from eating all of the birdseed. Vigilant dog. Good girl. They watch her out of the corner of their eyes, tails hang tantalizingly over the edge of the feeders, taunting her. Sometimes she lets them stay, eating, until someone comes outside and then she’s off like a shot, doing her job. Returning for a pat on the head. Returning to lay in the arms of the sun. While the squirrels, having been chased away, respect the agreed upon time, glancing at their watches, and then they climb up one feeder and down another. The game begins again.

When the temperature rises above 50 degrees, the bees venture out. Crowded around the lip of a fountain, they drink, they open their wings to the warmth of the sunshine, they stretch their legs, and then flit off to sniff out the pollen in the dandelion flowers. They fly around a bit winterdrunk, not sure exactly what they’re looking for. Perhaps all the flowers they’ve been dreaming of while they kept each other warm within the walls of their hive.

  

There are times of dormancy. Winter. Stasis. When ideas germinate and begin to press through the dirt of my mind. It’s hard to remember sometimes that what goes on under the surface is often more work than what is shown to the light of day. An image. A thought. A word. A string of words put together like a child-made necklace, strung one bead at a time from the tip of a silver needle onto a thread. A character coming slowly to life. A puppet turning into a real boy. A god turning into a swan. A beast turning into a prince. A memory. A heartbreak. A joy nearly inexpressible. The kindness of a friend. The inevitability of death. Birth. Rebirth. A seed burst out of the hard husk of its shell. Sometimes it’s hard to justify (to myself, to the world, to expectation) that reading is work. Staring off into the distance is work. Watching the bird and squirrels and dogs and insects is work. Thinking itself is work. Listening is work. Hatching stories is work. Germinating plots is work. Watering dialogue is work. Important work.

There are times of dormancy. Winter. When I have to remind myself that the power and the beauty of consciousness is our stories. That there is always room for one more tale. One more book. One more new imagining of an oft-told legend. That stories matter. If only to me. If only for me.

There are times of dormancy. When it feels like nothing is moving forward. And it might not be, for while all direction is not equal, perhaps I can’t move forward because, in fact, I and everything are actually moving upward toward the light.