Here in eastern Maine, it’s not uncommon to hear many of us,
myself included, complaining about the weather in springtime. We lose the first
few weeks of spring to the death throes of winter, and then we get a couple
months of mud, cold rain, and, finally, blackflies. Anyone attempting to live a
philosophical life, however, must examine the attitude with which we treat
these months. And so I asked myself, “What would Epictetus say about this?”
(Incidentally, this is a good question to apply to just about anything.) The
result is a Stoic-Christian poem in nine stanzas. Enjoy.
Springtime in Eastern Maine: A Stoic Dialogue in Poetic Form
Think not on what you’d have the weather be;
Rejoice
in what it is.
But we have skies of unrelenting gray, you say!
I say we have blankets of life-giving dew
O’erwrapping
our rocky hideaway—
Skies for which many a land
Would
trade their cloudless azure domes,
Which
lift the spirit for a day,
Then
render desolate what they have charmed.
But the rain is cold, you say, and miserable!
No more cold, say I,
Than
the snow two-fortnight past;
And a
good deal less miserable besides.
But we are all Israel in the desert,
Forgetting
the lessons of miseries past
In
the face of new discomforts.
And besides, cold gray rain is better matched
With
sipping tea, and playing piano,
And
writing poetry from inchoate thoughts
Than
any other weather I know.
But what of spring in warmer climes,
Where
the earth responds to winter’s death
In a riot
of resurrection,
Of
verdure and birdsong and flowering trees?
First, comparisons do no service for the truth:
Our
Maker is more artist than machine,
And
what he makes of you
Is
not what he makes of another.
To
compare yourself, your homeland,
To
another self, another land,
Is to
miss the splendor of his craftsmanship,
Which
spins a billion different worlds
Whose
greatest glory is to be themselves,
Just
as he has made them.
Second, an admission:
Our
spring may not be sublime, it’s true.
It’s rather more like prayer than paradise:
Inviting
us to step out and breathe deep,
To
wait in grateful patience
Through
short, infrequent glimpses
Of
the blessings yet to come;
To build up perseverant virtue
In
the crucible of time;
Learning to walk in step with what is now
And
leaning hopeward
Toward
what is yet to come:
This
is prayer, and this is Maine.
And further, while other climes rejoice
In
paradisiacal spring,
There awaits for them a passage
Through
Hades’ outer humidor,
Known
as summer in the southward lands.
And while they sweat and toil
In
heavy, sultry air,
Or retreat into the false refrigeration of their
homes,
Then
we shall have our paradise!
But still, you protest, when leaves do come,
We
still must endure, every year,
The
third and fourth plagues on Egypt!
And here it’s fit to teach ourselves
That
we are neighbors in a land
Not
meant for us alone.
If you want a land that’s been designed
To
cater to human whims alone,
Then what you want
Is
the unmitigated tedium of concrete suburbs,
Where
chastened nature is tamed
Toward
whatever pleases us.
But here, where we must persevere
Through
blackflies and mosquitoes,
We also share a quiet invitation
To
rejoice with brother warbler, sister trout,
In
the flood of God’s beneficence,
Which
descends in buzzing clouds
Like
holy manna every May and June.
I would not wish these plagues away
If I
must also say farewell
To
the warbler and the trout,
The
swallow and the spider,
The
quiet bat and croaking frog.
For
them, and for my love of them,
I
gladly bear the burden
Of
our communal life.
In all these things, spring teaches us
To be
more than we are now,
To
reduce not this great world
To
our delights alone.
The secret of spring is in walking slow,
In
letting our world
Simply
be herself,
And to
learn her wiser ways.
We cannot forget to speak our thanks
To
this slow and rugged corner of the earth,
And to love her for what she is
And for
what she was made to be,
Rather than asking her to be less
Than
the glory of what Providence grants her.
So bring on the mud and rain and gray-cast skies,
And teach me the grace,
As
Maine knows it,
Of
waking up slowly, patiently,
And
breathing deep
Before
paradise returns.