An ambiguous space between seasons sometimes allows me to break with my lineal mind. I lose expectations and even the tension of hope. I let go like I do when everything is beyond my control.
The fact that the advance of external spring this year is outside of my power gives me an excuse to imagine that I do not have influence in matters of internal spring. Allowing myself to be caught at the crossroads of interseasonal ambivalence, I give up my autonomy for a neutral sanctuary.
My anticipation about the approach of June and regret at the end of my spring procrastination spins me into a temporal and spatial slough, an aimless, spinning eye of the storm. Or it is as if the end of the some road were still a long way off, as though I were safely between the present location and my destination, as though I had no need to hurry, no need to follow any map, as though there still were plenty of time, as though the moment of truth had been delayed indefinitely.
Caught in the gateway between the last frost and the first strawberries, I cease to care which way I am going or how distant home remains, or even if there is a home. I take on the ambivalence of nature, riding that excuse at a peak of freedom in which the past hides and the future is unimagined, in which I, for this moment, live suspended above anticipation and commitment.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the first week of early summer. In the meantime, let yourself hover just a little between spring and summer.
