In my morning walks I would notice this new flower or that new leaf and feel connected to the natural world and the changing seasons. Spring in Vancouver is long and lovely and when I left home in mid-April it was already well into it, the tulips up, camelias, flowering, rhododendrons blooming and rosebuds forming.
But England had a very cold and slow start to Spring this year, and when I arrived the trees were completely bare. The only hint that the sun was entering the northern hemisphere were scores of bright yellow daffodils. I saw them in huge drifts on grassy fields and bare mounds. Every time I see such displays I always think of William Wordsworth's words:
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er Dales and Hills
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing daffodils
Only for some reason I always replace the word "dancing"with "golden" but then those Lakeland Romantics always did like their alliteration. And he did teach me what "iambic pentameter" is so I am grateful to him.
On my walks to and from the back clinic, the world was starting to wake here, buds forming and the smallest of flowers coming up again in the tiniest of cracks, every square inch a garden in this country. Just like spring, I am getting a second chance to relearn how to move and stand and move into the next phase of my life. I am lucky to have that chance just as I am lucky to witness the birth of sopring twice in the same year.
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