Spring!

Today is the second sunny day in a row. For Pittsburgh, this represents a Joe DiMaggio-style streak, a wildly improbable, hold-your-breath-and-hope-it-lasts accumulation of good fortune that defies both hope and the law of large numbers. Even the birds feel it. Newly returned from their winter walk-about, these fair-weather friends are warbling and clucking with shrill urgency, as if the village were erupting in flames and they were the alarm relays, sounding their shrill sirens until, at last, Man the Oblivious Animal raises his slow head, smells smoke, and lumbers into action.

One of the pleasures of having an autumn baby is that by the time Spring rolls around, the child is just getting into full discovery mode. Spring represents not just an end to the much-detested snowsuit, but an introduction to a whole new concept of space. The world is not framed by walls. When I take Zoogle for a walk these days, he looks at the sky, at treetops, rooflines, chimneys and telephone wires, anything high up. His head is tilted at a crazy angle, his brow holds its usual quasi-cranky furrow, and his mouth is wide open, aghast, as if he's blown away by the idea that the world extends beyond the boppy pillow, and that objects can reach even higher than the green-plumed posts on his jumperoo. That's right, kid: the world is a big place. It has clouds and neighbors and the gritty taste of park grass, dogs that will lick you in your stroller, scrofulous wild cats which we will choose to ignore, chill breezes, dogwood blossoms, bright clothes waving on a line. And this is just the tip of the iceberg (wait until you find out about girls.)

Thinking about speaking to Zoogle in these terms is a useful exercise, for it reminds me that I've lost track of some basic principles. By nature and by will, I have always been an Expansionist, a believer in the outward-opening, life-advancing power of new experience. I have staked a good portion of my emotional and intellectual capital on the idea that there is no end to the number of ways in which man can conceive and mold his life, and that the world will yield its treasures to anyone with the faith, heart, and drive to follow his sense of wonder. Yet in the depth of this year's winter, when I hadn't seen the sun for months, when the trees stood dead and leafless in the park, when the boarded up row houses leered at me as I rode to work amid ice and road rage, I forgot about this idea. I forgot that winters end, that birds return, and that new life emerges. I forgot that what I was seeing was a vision framed not by some objective present, but the fact that I had allowed this present to become a stiff, dead thing, an object whose ontological limits began and ended in itself, instead of a dynamic conduit to other modes of thinking, being, and acting.

Spring is a good excuse to revisit those principles. Here it is: eruptive, cacophonous, radiant, demanding. Long oppressed, it riots in the streets, and threatens the old gray order with nothing less than total regime change. It brings beauty and a sense of opening, and as I watch Benjamin rubber neck the tree tops and mouth-trawl for flies, I feel that old, holy sense of motion again, the sense that though the center might not hold, and things will fall, that they can fall together in new and life giving ways. For Kafka it was the Book, for me it is Nature: the ice-axe that breaks the frozen sea within us. Time to start connecting.