May Flowers.

April showers bring May flowers, they say. A small reminder that the downpours are a natural part of the creative effort that births all good things.

It was a long winter here in the Midwest. But more than that, it was a long winter here in myself, too. Followed by a long season of sadness, followed by a long season of letting go.

As a creative person, I hinge everything on this hope that the seasons are never wasted. The seasons of picking or planting, the layers of grief and death, the sunshine and the storms alike enrich the soil from which beautiful lives and stories grow.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself so ardently trying to capture this spring after the long wait of winter, in iPhone photos and buds plucked from a blooming tree, in long hikes with friends. It is a survival instinct, a heartbeat, a pulse. It is my soul trying in every tactile way to capture hope. A way of saying to myself, your spring will come too.

It’s May now and the April showers are receding. I think I feel a new season coming in on a warmer wind. Seeds buried in the soil long ago are finally peeking through, green shoots of growth rising from dark earth. The effort and wait of years finally coming to fruition.

And I sense that tightness of possibility like a bloom still in its bud : everything in its time.