The garden has suddenly come alive with flowers. Everything is so green and fresh. I love to wake up early and soak it in.

Even the pear tree on my earthly mother’s grave is blooming. I go and visit with her when I can, and bring flowers from the garden and water for the pear tree. After the first shock wore off, I am feeling so much the lack of her presence – things come to me that I want to tell her or share with her, but I can’t.  I miss the way my mother would feed me and listen to my problems. I feel like I need her right now.  And i just miss her.

As much as I am missing my earthly mother, I am taking comfort in the beauty and kindness of my Earth Mother this spring. Because I work with her so closely, I feel so much her quiet presence, her love and support. She also feeds me and listens to my problems.

More and more I am understanding how things work here with the Earth Mother. For so much of my journey to this new land I turned towards the eternal, the transcendent, because all the earthly things in my life were shifting around and collapsing. It was all I had in those moments. Now i am working again with it and coming to see how this earthly power works.

It arises so spontaneously, and is so tangible and real-seeming, so solid and comfortable. It fills you, like the pure light of the full moon, full of silver power and quiet presence. And then, like the moon, it disappears into the darkest of nights.

It is when it disappears that we struggle with it. We want it to be here and last forever. But that’s not how it works. It waxes and wanes and shifts, and vanishes, flattens out and disperses, and then reappears in a different shape, like clay.

We feel like it should last forever and ever because it’s so solid and tangible, but it must be grasped and worked with HERE and NOW, before it’s slides around, before it rots into the earth or falls apart like a spent rose.

It’s this cycling, this here-and-gone ephemeral nature of it that we struggle with.  Not the here part, but the gone part, not realizing this is the only way it CAN be, and we must work with it this way.

Everything here follows the same pattern, and in the blooming garden I feel the presence of the spinners and the thread keepers, the ones who spin out the fullness and, when it’s time, snip the ends.