I spent the day with friends yesterday including my friend Karly, who will be giving birth to a little girl in the coming days. While at their home in Knoxville I heard birds singing – a sound I hadn’t heard yet up where I live on the mountain. Every chirp seemed to impart a visceral thrill. No song is more pure or beautiful, but I think it was the announcement of spring and summer that felt like a bodily release. This morning, on the mountain, I woke up to the sound again as if to affirm the credibility of the news.

Now I’m seeing Karly as a metaphor of the whole world! She’s in probably the most uncomfortable part of pregnancy, the last days. The baby is dropping, pelvic bones hurting, anticipation measured with patience. And in the woods just outside my home Iseem to feel the birds and the little shivering animals, trees and bushes all in breathless, uncomfortable anticipation – everything about two weeks away from exploding with new life.

We humans have been gestating too. Whatever this strange experience of winter has created in me is still forming. An article I am writing is at that uncomfortable place where everything I know how to say has been said, a set up for the next part which I don’t know how to say.  The due date is in a week. And the friends I spent the day with yesterday are ready for the thaw so that John can get back into his not adequately heated workshop to renew his furniture building, and Lori, the photographer, is poised to capture on film the first spring flowers as they come up from below. The Oscars have been handed out, and the artists who won them are ready to give birth to a whole new post-Oscar career. My Mom is coming home from the hospital. I feel all of nature ready in anticipation to give birth to something new.

And as so often happens, Rilke’s writing for today aligns with these thoughts.

Allow your judgments their own undisturbed development, which, like any unfolding, must come from within and can by nothing be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birth. To allow each impression and each embryo of a feeling to complete itself in the dark, in the unsayable, the not-knowing, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and humbly and patiently to await the dawning of a new clarity: that alone is the way of the artist – in understanding as in creating.
              -Rainer Maria Rilke
                Letters to a Young Poet

Here it all comes. Let’s be ready. It is exciting. Blessings be for the birth of all things.