“This morning, I must get off an “important” letter right away—one on which the success of a certain under-taking depends; but instead I write a love letter—which I do not send. I gladly abandon dreary tasks, rational scruples, reactive undertakings imposed by the world, for the sake of a useless task deriving from a dazzling Duty: the lover’s Duty.” -Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse
Such is spring – the feeling of the sap rising in the sugar woods, the tender yet resilient heads of crocuses pushing sun-ward through the crust of snow, or the scent of lilacs on the breeze, wafting us off course, sure as Pepe le Peu that wherever we were headed no longer merits a second sniff.
Such is Spring. And what was I “supposed” to be doing? Taxes? Spring cleaning? Folding laundry? Returning emails? Do these dreary tasks not pale beside the dazzling duty of the lover — to praise spring? To be in it, and of it?
And what became of Roland Barthes, you may ask?
Preeminent literary critic of the 20th century, author, lover of life, ceaseless affirmer of love as value?
He was hit by a bus, the ultimate slap in the face for not paying “attention” to the mundane. Somewhere beyond the intersection of banal and sublime, his spirit flies free – for what is a traffic light, or even a honking horn, or the roar of a smoggy motor, compared to the memory, or the imagination – the sensual, all-consuming dream-world – of the lover’s touch, as you stroll along the streets of Paris in spring? Alone in the bustling crowds, your head in the clouds?
In Yoga, we meditate so that our attention becomes one pointed – imagine – to focus on a flickering flame, a single grain of sand, a slender flower. Yet in that unifying, steady gaze, the all looms large – beyond the flame, connected to it, the crisping, burning wick, and the deftly-moving, weathered hands of the old woman who wove it, the molten wax and the scent of honey, the bees in the lavender, the farmer’s patient hoe, the soil pushing up the crops to the tender mouths of cattle, of babes, the forgiving soil that receives the imprint of a thousand-million paw-prints, hoof-prints, foot-prints, tire-tracks, and deeper, the bodies of those whose souls have risen and moved on, as light and free as the scent of lilacs on the breeze. Beyond that, the all. The lap of the ocean against the shore, each eroding into the other: ceaseless change.
Such is spring, pushing us to rise up again, to change, to grow, to evolve, erode, resolve, and dance again, to hear the distant yet intimate music that turns to the beating of the heart, the memory of a fragment of a love poem, the drumming of the small rain on the roof of a house by the sea in St. Tropez… yes.
Such is spring.
Let it sing you, and dance in your veins.
(But do keep an eye out for the bus.)
Love,
Erin
