Welcoming Spring 2019

Spring comes to me this year with a quality of intensity unlike any spring I have seen before. In Colorado the season has barely started but its certain presence is everywhere evident. Tiny new shoots of leaves, of grasses, of spring wheat in the fields, and early season flowers are peeking out everywhere. Our lawn begins to breathe green again.

I begin to breathe again, too. 

This past winter has been one of the hardest seasons I’ve ever lived through, not so much because of weather but because of circumstances. The circumstances my husband Peter and I faced brought with them an emotional climate of profound darkness the likes of which I have not seen in decades. The questions we struggled with were less about why and more about whether we would survive. Everything became very elemental. Vision became overshadowed with shadow. There were days that I doubted we would survive and doubted whether it would be worth it even if we did. 

Perhaps this past winter was like that for you, too. 

Spring never does come overnight. It comes as an unfolding, slow and sometimes ragged. But come it most truly and certainly does. It comes so persistently we cannot prevent it or even slow it. Like dawn comes certainly after night, no matter how long or dark, Spring comes after winter. Emergence after suffering is a slow and sometimes ragged process, but it is not not our ending point. Spring is our grand reminder that how are things are now — “always winter and never Christmas!” —  is not going to be the way they always are. There is a Day coming when the great thaw and breaking of the curse will unfold around us, just like spring itself.

Like seeds that fall into the soil, decay in the darkness, and emerge later into a new form for an exalted purpose, we also fall into the soil of hardship and in the darkness there are broken and decay, later to emerge in a new form. It’s easy to write about that as an analogy; it is much harder and more costly to live inside that paradigm. It is sometimes easy to talk light-heartedly about rebirth and resurrection as though we are on familiar terms with wonder and mystery. Such talk is either out of ignorance or it is whistling in the dark against our deep fears. 

The only path to resurrection is through death. 

Earlier this year my friend Christina wrote me something that has been lingering in my thoughts about cultivating, planting, surrendering, and trusting through the process of a seed dying to be made new. She wrote,

It is the oaks of righteousness that become Placemakers and restorers. This is why we cultivate. 

The image of Rosa glauca is (c) Lancia E. Smith and used with glad permission for The Cultivating Project. 

Lancia E. Smith

Lancia E. Smith is an author, photographer, teacher, and publisher. She is the founder of Cultivating Oaks Press, Cultivating Magazine, and its fellowship of writers and makers, The Maker’s Project.  She has been honoured to serve in executive management, church leadership, school boards, and Art & Faith organizations throughout her career.

Now empty-nesters, Lancia & her husband Peter make their home in the Black Forest of Colorado, keeping company with 200 Ponderosa Pine trees,  a herd of mule deer, two beautiful black cats, a wild fox, and an ever expanding library. Lancia loves land reclamation, website and print design, beautiful typography, road trips, being read aloud to by Peter, and cherishes the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and George MacDonald. She lives with daily wonder of the mercies of the Triune God and in constant gratitude for the beloved company of Cultivators.

Her newest endeavours will be released in the autumn of 2026. Bearing Witness: Conversations with Malcolm Guite, and its companion guide book, Recovering Witness. 

You can follow Lancia here in Cultivating, on her website for Lancia E. Smith, and on her Substack Cultivating A Writer’s Life. 

www.cultivatingoakspress.com