ZenView
We welcome a new ZenView by Chris Condon, recommended by Mary Layton who graced these pages for nearly a decade. Chris is a recently retired school psychologist and former middle school English teacher who enjoys writing, music, photography, and the outdoors. He has been practicing t’ai chi with the T’ai Chi Ch’uan Academy of Modesto since the early 2000s and has an ongoing mindfulness meditation practice. He loves to travel to far-off and less visited places. He lives in Modesto with his wife and their two cats. Welcome Chris and Thank You Mary – Chris Murphy
The Great Arising
By Chris Condon
As I am writing this column in mid-February here in California’s magnificent Central Valley, hints of spring already abound. The trees are still mostly bare, and the California poppies have not yet opened their flaming bonnets of gold. Yet even today, as I look out at the expansive country fields on the edge of town, an image comes to my mind’s eye – more a premonition, really, but nevertheless quite distinct.
I imagine fields upon fields of almond blossoms arising, as if in an instant, by magic, as far as the eye can see.
When I first moved to Modesto from the Bay Area in the late 1980’s, I recall one day in late February when, driving down the freeway, I looked out the car window and suddenly saw an entirely new world. The almond trees had bloomed. Where winter had once reigned, with its own lovely character of overcast skies, its intermittent wind and rain, its holiday and new year celebrations, something else had arisen in its place. Far from being just another day on the calendar, I sensed on that day that something deeper and more mysterious had been changing all along.
Now again the seasons are turning, spinning the world around and within us. This is the spring equinox. The great arising.
I am reminded of Bruce Springsteen’s song, The Rising. “Come on up for the rising”, he sings. It is a call out of ourselves, our self-preoccupation, away from that sense of implosion (“this darkness,” Springsteen calls it) that modern society seems to engender in so many of us. “Come on up, lay your hands in mine,” he sings. This uprising is collective and universal; it is for everyone, everywhere, for all time. Even our ancestors are here with us, in memory and spirit, their “eyes burnin’ bright”, he sings.
And here we are, in this moment, and the spring is here, too, as if it were our companion, sharing our joy in being alive as we walk the earth, breathe the cool air, and see the fields of almond blossoms in white, shining in the sun.
