Ground-breaking; Thought-Provoking

Ground-breaking; Thought-Provoking

I’ve often said that February is the longest month of the year. It lives between the dark of winter and the hope of spring. There’s not much good about February here in the Great Lakes region of the USA. Even though winters have been warmer over the last decade or two, “warmer” is a subjective term.

February is a cloudy, windy, wet, and cold excuse for a month. And this year, as my luck would have it, they’ve added an extra day to it for leap year. They could have just as easily added it to April or June, but they didn’t. I would love to know who “they” are. I have a feeling “they” are from somewhere in the southern hemisphere where February comes in the middle of summer.

Fortunately, we are passed the midpoint of February with just more than a week left in this hideous month. Of course, that week will seem like a month – but it is what it is.

Yesterday, amid my February blues, I saw a dozen crocuses pushing up through the cold, nearly frozen soil. They were doing a little ground-breaking — pushing their tiny green shoots up through the cold winter ground.

I stood there staring at this tiny miracle of life. How amazing it is that these tiny living things push up through the cold brittle soil every single year. And in a couple of weeks, they’ll bloom into beautiful, colorful little flowers. They’ll be the only bright colors I’ll see until the daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths blossom next month.

What makes these pretty little flowers’ lives so important that they push through the nearly frozen ground to bloom for a few days, and then wither and disappear every single year?

Life is mysterious and not even the most brilliant scientist can tell us the purpose of life.  A crocus lives for its few days in the sun and then disappears again into the darkness underground. What is its purpose? Is it to make the world brighter? Is it to tell us not to despair – that spring and summer will be back again soon?

Life is all around me but I don’t know what it is or why it is.

The trees still stand stark and lifeless, like skeletons stuck in the ground. They’ve been this way since November and they’ll be this way until May. What is their purpose? What will to survive must they have to grow into such majestic wonders?

I’ve often debated with myself if trees might be a higher form of life than most. They do not toil. They make food from sunlight. They soak up the summer sun and sleep all winter. They have no reason to scurry about from here to there. Forests of trees make the world more beautiful and they make wonderful places to hike through or just sit and contemplate.

But why do we have trees? What is the purpose of trees? Are trees higher or lower life forms than me?  Are they more important than the crocuses that are just now breaking ground?

And where do I stand in all of this? How important am I in this world so full of life? Am I more important than the crocuses that spend most of their lives underground? Am I more or less important than the majestic trees that make the forest in which I so dearly love to hike – or sometimes just sit and contemplate?

Today I saw tiny ground-breaking crocuses and it was thought-provoking.

What do you think of when you see a tiny plant spring from a seed or a tree go from a brittle, lifeless skeleton to a magnificent stately tree, covered with thousands of leaves, all swaying in harmony in a gentle summer breeze?