Celebrating transience

The grass has turned green again and the flowers have started to bloom in the words of Nelson Mandela.

The grass has turned green again and the flowers have started to bloom in the words of Nelson Mandela. Chill winds of winter have given way to the warmth of a young spring sky and the trees are agog with bird wing. 8220;What are our sublimest paintings when compared with this dawn?8221; Our music set beside bird song?

I can see the dewdrops like strings of pearls on petals still shy and wrinkling with pleasure in the golden sunrise and the butterflies and dragonflies flutter and pirouette from flower to flower. What celestial steps can match the gentle colourful perambulations of these ephemeral creatures? The nooks and crannies in old tumbling walls come alive with nameless flower and leaf telling us the spirit of creation has not forgotten the mundane. The canvas is broad but the brush has not missed its stroke. The roadways and pathways yet to fully wake up from the footfalls that would soon follow seem to beckon, throw open vistas into the known and unknown. Surely, the Song of the Road. Is this not the time to hit the road and journey to the mountains, those monuments of splendour, turning red and gold by turns, eternal odes to creation?

Or would it be the beaches with sands of silk and waters that surprise with their rhythms and colours and their dark secrets? Or a mere walk through the forest turning green with young leaf and twig, the sinuous confusion of creepers at my feet stopping me at every step? Spring is the time for rejuvenation, for feeling the sap flowing through creation, for regaining that sense of self we seem to have lost in other seasons.

Should we not set aside days and hours to revel in the flaming orange of our gulmohar trees and glory in the sunflowers and marigolds like they do at the cherry blossom festival in Japan, the lavender festival in France and the tulip festival in Ottawa ?

The beautiful cherry blossom in Japan is celebrated in the haiku and by the Japanese in their annual cherry blossom viewing events. Offices close early and holidays are declared for the celebratory event. The cherry blossom has a short life and is the celebration of a beauty that is transient, the grand connect between man and nature.

Let us celebrate this transience. In the words of the 17th-century Japanese poet, Bosho, 8220;A lovely spring night suddenly vanished while we viewed cherry blossoms.8221;