I’m in the midst of reading The Overstory, a novel that requires patience. The story is so utterly human, yet shows just how minor of a blip we humans are. Mere sentences have stopped me in my tracks. I have read and reread sentences and paragraphs intertwined with a salon’s worth of deep, intellectual topics.

The woven narratives have moved me to tears, made my stomach knot, made me pause, made me appreciate, and made me consider just how much of the natural world I have taken for granted. Every day, a great universe slips under my radar, undetected. In reading The Overstory, this excerpt emerged and gave voice to these photos, a collection of my spring curiosity, that had sat unused for months. I had rumblings of sentiment but not the right words.

“The wind throws out gossip; the branches of all the Brinkman anniversary plantings wave, scandalized. There’s danger everywhere, readiness, intrigue, slow-motion rising action, epic changes of season once too slow to see that now blast past his bed too quickly to make sense of.” –The Overstory by Richard Powers

This spring we collectively faced a new “normal.” COVID-19 yanked me from my narratives, titles, busyness, distractions, and the general blur I had been nursing. In the void, I found a slow, quiet revival. At age 36, I truly experienced spring for what felt like the first time. I watched the minute progress of plants, the quiet sweeping of leaves over branches, the inner workings of tulips, the bright addicting scent of hyacinths and lilacs. I felt a communion with a tree I’d overlooked for years. “Slow-motion rising action.”

I walked and walked. I listened and observed. I soaked up a new quiet. I found so many secret pockets and corners. I wandered with curiosity. Marked by buds and blossoms, time slowed in a desirable way. Now, as the nights grow cooler, the sun sets earlier, and a new season teases its approach, I want to remember the intention I felt this spring. I want to savor the current and coming season, to appreciate the beautiful, incremental, wild moments. The epic changes, both within and outside me.

May you live these times to their fullest!