“The world’s favorite season is the spring,” wrote Edwin Teale (North with the Spring, 1951). “All things seem possible in May.”
Nearly a hundred years earlier, another American naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, took the same view. He said that we find in spring “the principle of renewal of the eternal—the year beginning with younger hope than ever.”
Thoreau believed that “nature has no history; its memory goes back a year and no more.” He said that likewise the spring walker has no history, “no baggage too heavy for the journey.”
I say Thoreau was half right. I wish my baggage would disappear once a year. It doesn’t. But if it did, other loads would replace it. However, I am a believer in spring, both as a season and a metaphor. The melting snow, budding trees and returning birds send a strong message of hope, and drinking it in on spring walks reminds me God is continually renewing what the winter has taken.
*In the next blog, I’ll write about walking in summer.