spring

You have seen so much of the outer world and had so many experiences of people, places, and things—and of course those experiences will keep coming. But now, in the second half of your life, as the outer world seems more unstable and dangerous than ever, we want you to take the same rapacious curiosity that once thrust you all over the planet with a hungry, fascinated appetite, and we want you to turn it inward.

All words have a history. But some are particularly interesting to explore when it comes to psychology—because they're directly born from it. How many times have you been mesmerized by something, so captured by it that it was like you were in a trance? The word "mesmerize" dates back to an 18th century Austrian physician named Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). He established a theory of illness that involved internal magnetic forces, which he called animal magnetism. (It would later be known as mesmerism.)

A blue-bell springs upon the ledge,
A lark sits singing in the hedge;
Sweet perfumes scent the balmy air,
And life is brimming everywhere.
What lark and breeze and bluebird sing,
Is Spring, Spring, Spring!

Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn't easy.

The cricket doesn't wonder
if there's a heaven
or, if there is, if there's room for him.

It's fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house
through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.

He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.

This must mean something, I don't know what.
But certainly it doesn't mean
he hasn't been an excellent cricket
all his life.

Beloved Earth, ancient dreamer, keeper of bones and stories—
We, breath in your body, stardust in your veins,
Come before you with hearts both broken and burning.

In this time of the Great Turning,
When despair and possibility dance in the same holy darkness—
May we offer ourselves as imaginal cells in your metamorphosis...

May we be scattered like spores,
Each carrying a fraction of the future,
Each vital, each necessary, each aflame
With particular purpose...