[Seasons: Spring II]
There’s a truth about spring, like a family secret, that is stuffed and hidden. Before spring is sprung it's the worst kind of winter. In other words, before spring is full of life, it’s a dark, wet mess.
Life is full of the darkness of winter—times that are relentlessly troubling, draining, and debilitating. When questions return without answers. When searching leads to dead ends. When suffering begets more pain. When brokenness and stress and chaos is unbearable. The promise of spring is no consolation when spring finally arrives and it’s indistinguishable from winter.
Consolation in suffering is not the promise of less suffering. Promises of better days always return void to some degree because they never come soon enough and when they arrive, if they do, we’re confronted with the truth that there is new suffering. Consolation in suffering is the affirmation of suffering. Not because pointing at something bad and saying, “That’s bad!” somehow makes it magically better, but because suffering is compounded in secret and grows in isolation.
Early spring reminds us that every season if full of darkness and mud. Pretending it’s all cherry blossoms makes the gloom all the more unbearable.
