I can feel the groggy-eyed earth roll lazily in her late-winter slumber beneath my feet. The soil is warming. The snow doesn’t stick quite as long these days. We are greeted with rain as often as we are with flurries, and the warmth of the sun flavors the air with notes of melt and the promise of blooming lilacs. I am serenaded each morning by the calls of the early spring songbirds who flit through the cedar and flash their colors on the still leafless catalpa. They sing a community into being; chirps of excitement and of longing for companionship are answered with echoing calls and the quick “vrrr” of youthful wings gathering beneath my window.

These sounds are sacred to me after the darkness of the last few months. The call to communion wakes me out of an anxiety-filled bleakness and reminds me of the need to risk being seen and heard by those that surround me. I recognize the strength in the vulnerability needed to echo back an invitation to connect and to call into emptiness in hope of a response.

And, I wonder, what is the song that guides me? What do I sing into the wind as my heart stirs for companionship?

Last year I fell in love with the song Maps by Lesley Roy. It spoke to my journey with depression, suicidal ideation, and finding hope in my stone-built cottage alongside Brewery Creek in Mineral Point. It continues to remind me of my strength and of the power I found in community. In a maybe odd way, I hear the chirps of the fluttering finches echo the lyrics: “I feel twice, I’m twice as strong.”

I meet a new spring in the year, and I meet a new spring in my life, as I transition into a clinical setting and a new weekly rhythm. I have made it…more than twice…and I think I can go even further. That’s what I hear in the songs of the spring birds.

And I wonder, what do others hear as the softening snow slides off of roofs across the town? What do others listen for in the songs of the birds and the warming breezes? What is your song that sings you into communion and encourages you to risk the call into emptiness?

In my heart, I fervently wish that we meet each other in our songs of hope…