The slightest smile can change a life.  One wee giggle can gladden a day.

Joy is contagious; it can’t be contained.   When it touches a heart’s strings they vibrate in kind.

Sing, then!  However soft your voice, however brief your song, set it free, send it forth, pass it on.

In the face of all this loveliness–the soft air, the gentle sky, the lilting songs of the morning birds—I am filled with more gratitude than my heart can bear.

What can I do, but give you all that I am?

Here: Take my secrets, my longings, my dreams.   Take my moisture, my colors, my scent, my form.

Your breath brushes across my petals, and my soul takes flight in joy.

Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t. They’re only stories, after all.  And that’s not much to hold you up.

So sometimes we fall.

The reason for that—for the falling—is to help you rip up your story and see what’s there, beyond it.

At worst, you get to put it back together in a slightly different way.

At best, you no longer need it at all.

Every day comes with its own gifts, of course.  But some, I’ve found, disguise them, making you hunt for the prize.   You can go months, years, before you see what it was.

But some days unfold with unblemished perfection that sings through all the hours, from the first whisper of dawn ‘til the stars are sailing in the sky.  And as they close, they float into your heart, just to remind you that perfection is possible, and that you lived in it one day in spring.

Most beauty is fleeting—and all the more precious because it is so.

But oh, while these flowers  bloom, how they bless us!  How could you think we are not loved, for the world to bring forth such creations?

“What do you say?  A day at the park?  Tell me now, does that sound like a lark?”

“No, it sounds like a gander, you big, silly goose, with deep goosey bark, or it might be a moose.”

But she went for it, quite gladly, of course.  And later, they went for a swim.

He knew how to play.  She’d give him that.  It was one thing (of many) she loved about him.

So they strolled through the grass and swam in the stream, and the whole day seemed like a beautiful dream.

Then, when the sun sank, it was back to the nest, where gander and goose put the goslings to rest.

Then they cuddled and cooed as mated geese do.  “ I feel so blessed, my sweetheart, don’t you?”

.

As if their beauty weren’t enough—the nearly white blossoms filling the boughs of the tree, the perfect heart-like leaves—they host the feet of countless birds.

Chickadees, cardinals, and finches come to sing from their branches, jays, and larks, and robins, too.

And oh, how the yellow swallowtails adore them, fluttering from bloom to bloom.

Who could blame them?  If I were a bird or butterfly, I would fly there, too, losing myself in this welcoming tree, breathing the lilac scent of heaven.

You, wild one, who roams in your pack with such unpretentious sweetness over the hillsides and along the roads, asking nothing but to color our lives with your passing, you are of untold worth.

You capture our glance and steal away our troubles, pulling us out of ourselves and into a world blessed with springtime and beauty.

All at once we are awake and seeing the way the thin clouds sweep across the blue high sky, the way the sunlight dances through the trees’ lacy leaves.

And look how high the grass is already!  And, Martha, aren’t those purple flowers pretty?

You may believe that you are alone, a singular blossom with no others of your kind in sight.

Still, the morning dew finds you and decorates you with translucent pearls.  And although you can’t perceive it, beings from a dimension adjacent to your own are gazing at your beauty right this very moment and saying to themselves, “How precious!  How sweet!”

And they think that you are brave and they cherish your song.

“He can’t see the forest for the trees,” she said, wanting him to take a broader view.

There’s something to be said for pulling back from things a bit, for seeing the context, for getting a glimpse of the larger whole.

Changes of perspective can work magic. Looking down on things from way up high shows you that the whole would not be the same without all the pieces that compose it.

Do you want them to be same?  Or, with your artist’s hand, would you like to add a piece here, or perhaps let that one go?

But even the high soaring hawk returns to the trees when its flight is through, finding comfort in their branches.

As for me, walking amidst life’s forest, today I choose simply to marvel at the splendor of the trees.