CROCUS POCUS – A Magical Message of Spring

In the fall of my sophomore year in college, my roommate and fraternity brother, Kim, planted crocuses around the big elm in the Chi Psi lodge's front yard. I was either too self-involved or too impatient to fully grasp the significance of that act…until spring, that is.

After that long, gray New England winter and two trimesters with my spirit confined within classrooms, books and my own head, those brave little purple, white and yellow flowers did more than brighten my spirits; they taught me something I'd always remember about my sense of wonder.

That was all about being in the here & now. What 
I had yet to learn was about the there & then.

Those crocuses were far from my only connection with Nature; I'd grown up, like most kids those days, with the great blessing of having nowhere to go but outdoors, little to do but play. Once I was in school, I was as likely to be listening to a bird, an insect, or the wind just outside the classroom window as I was the teacher.

But that was all about being in the here and now. What I had yet to learn was about the there and then, about the small investments wonder so often requires of us.

Nature would take each of those tiny 
bulbs and turn it into a miracle.

In Kim's case it was, most obviously, his investment of intention—I want to start something, grow something—followed, certainly, by patience. But it was also a venture of hope and faith. He knew—he believed—that, from that humble gesture of kneeling, digging and setting in those tiny bulbs, Nature would take each of them and turn it into a miracle.

I'll always be grateful to Kim for planting those bulbs…and for planting in me those seeds of understanding that wonder is not always impetuous. For that is the soul of spring: faith, rewarded; beauty, bestowed; life, proclaimed.

HAPPY SPRING TO ALL!