Like love, spring does not rise complete or whole from space or ether, is never a priori, in spite of the fact that it often seems to strike so suddenly and spontaneously. Instead, like love, spring is precariously dependent upon a fabric of song and odor and tactile sensation and visual angle and color and chemical surges that build one upon the other day after day until it is much too late to return to winter dormancy and expectation and solitude.
Hepatica Sun
The essayist Rebecca Solnit writes that “the very notion of giving meaning to something is premised on a cosmology in which things don’t have it yet.”
So, for example, when I talk about the meaning of spring, I am entering a verbal landscape in which the different elements of that season make no necessary sense in themselves. Spring (like love), then, and the meaning of spring are not self-evident, are not a priori notions. They depend on my experience and construction of them, after the fact, a posteriori. They balance on synthesis and projection, on acceptance and on letting go.
Here in the first week of February, my encounter with the reclusive spring is still a fabrication of faith, of hope, imagination, recollection, longing. It even sometimes seems that winter will last forever, that my dreams of warmth will never come true.
But the idea that giving meaning is premised on a cosmology in which things don’t yet have meaning uncovers the benign and beckoning passivity of the land around me.
And so I remind myself that even though the world appears so vast, even though it seems so cold and so bare now, and even though I am completely insignificant upon its surface, even though my body is as ephemeral as the petals of a flower, it is the I, it is the mind, the self alone, that is able to perceive and uncover and allow Earth’s meaning and make spring come true.
First I wondered if this essay represents a wonderful synthesis of science and art, so to speak. It also shows mastery of the sentence which holds off its main point, sustaining through multiple introductory clauses, and that kind of sentence reflects the theme of the entire piece, as I understand it. But most of all I notice the concept of God-given freedom: we have been allowed to assign meaning even as things are givens or gifts and have value in themselves, apart from us and a part from us. Have I come close at all to some of the meaning of this lovely writing? That we have been given the gift of being co-creators. Then, one asks, to what must one be faithful? I guess a key word is “necessary” sense in themselves.How affirming of the future, of eternity and a God Who defies Being limited and constrained.
Barbara, I suppose it is our innate freedom – but also necessary practice – to fabricate seasons from sense data. Menander says: “The mind is god in each of us.” Without that god, the atoms of the external world (if they really exist) spin without meaning…to us.