Spring On 57th Street

April arrives and the sun peeks out. I crawl out of my home like a little mouse. Walking amidst the magnolia boughs of 57th Street, I wade through memories of last spring. You know. Back then. When we were fresh with all the new horrors, obligations and responsibilities of 2020.

In these recent days I’ve been taking stock and recontextualizing, mostly trying to understand. I can’t quite say I’m nostalgic about last spring but it definitely feels like we’ve come through something — something bigger than just winter.

Apropos of that, I read a passage recently by Mary Oliver in her memoir Upstream — which was published about a century ago in 2016 and so has nothing to do with the hard truths of the past year. Still it reads as so specifically about us, about now. It energized me to find that spark of recognition across the distance, years and breadth of human experience. And ain’t that what’s so grand about reading? 

“In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don't know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith — only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.”