Spring Reflection

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Last night my wife and I took our little boy for a walk at a nearby park, and everywhere on display were the hallmarks of spring: blossoming trees and trees about to blossom, lush green grass, full rain clouds slashed here and there by bright swords of sunlight. The beauty of it all. The beauty of it all felt almost like a kind of violence, an assault on the senses--something you have to finally turn away from or else turn to salt. To think that this life goes on in winter, under scabs of snow and ice; that these blossoms are locked up in the trees' slow blood, a promise, a possibility, beyond our ability to touch; and that it all happens so suddenly, creeping up like a cloud, this phenomenon--spring--that so dwarfs our lives. And indeed how small I felt chasing my boy in the grass last night, listening to his giggles and the honking geese, and back behind it all, the wind in the pines: how small I felt, and how good.