Moving the Wood Pile For Daffodils: God and Maple Syrup

Last September I was sawing large limbs the hurricane ripped off my old, old sugar maples. I stacked the logs neatly by the side of the old whitewashed barn-garage and left them there all winter. A few days ago I noticed daffodils peeking out from under the wood pile, and began to move the logs to another place. By next September some of that good maple will be aged enough to make some lovely fires in my woodstove. Another kind of blossoming, and just as with the daffodils, heart-stirring in a quiet way.

In February I invented a comfort-food recipe, an egg custard made with almond milk and some brown rice flour, sweetened with a little stevia and some maple syrup - the real stuff. I couldn't seem to get enough of that maple syrup. Around that time the children in my folk music class told me that they'd been helping their parents gather maple sap and boil it down to syrup: forty gallons of sap make one gallon of syrup, they said. There's something right about maple syrup.

Maple syrup making, the sawing of logs for woodstove fires on a cold damp night, the rising of daffodils from the dark to trumpet spring all golden against the whitewashed wall - I look up at the full moon knowing there's a way for everything that's right to happen, and there's a pilgrimage of heart awaiting each of us, and a sign to remind us. We're daffodils finding a way to push our leaves out from under the pile of wood; we're the sweetness in the sap knowing our essence will be distilled and deeply appreciated.

Once I knew myself as muddy-handed daughter of a busy angry mother who sometimes rocked me to sleep and sometimes read me stories and sometimes sent me wailing to my room with no supper. Once I knew myself as writer painter singer lonely-in-her-marriage-wife of a man who sometimes played music with me and sometimes disappeared his heart. Once I knew myself as wanderer, leaving behind and leaving behind and leaving behind again, lover of One who sometimes overflowed His Everything into my awareness, and sometimes emptied all my knowing with a wink. Once I thought I knew myself, not as a me but rather as a what; and that's when I became the know-nothing/be-everything sap rising in the trunk, ready for the tapping and the pouring out and boiling down to sweetness.