The essayist Rebecca Solnit says 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 sense – possess no meaning – in and of or by themselves.
Spring, then, and the meaning of spring are not self-evident. They depend on our construction of them.
Here in the third week of early spring, the sense of the land’s rebirth is still reclusive, a fabrication of faith, of hope, of imagination, of recollection, of longing, of cabin fever, perhaps, or seasonal affective disorders.
Rebecca Solnit’s statement about how meaning is premised on a cosmology in which things don’t yet have meaning uncovers the passivity of the world in front of our naming minds.
And so I remind myself that even though the Earth appears so vast and massive, even though it is still so cold and bare, and even though I am completely insignificant upon its surface and within its billions of years of age, even though my body is as ephemeral as the petals of a flower, it is I, it is the mind, the self alone, that will see and will uncover meaning and make the spring come true.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack, I’ll be back again next week with notes for the fourth week of early spring. In the meantime, think and imagine and make the spring come true.
