These crocuses come up every year within three feet of our front door. The corms lie dormant from summer to late winter when in defiance of frost and snow they announce the coming of Spring.
Late afternoon the sun finds them, and they begin to open. George Herbert's lovely poem, 'The Flower' asks the deeper question about the rhythm of the seasons in the life of the soul and life in God.
"Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown."
These crocuses are an annual reminder of God's renewing grace and gift of life. They are a sacrament in colour, a prayer in purple. An assurance that even when much in life seems fruitless and gone, there is the promise beyond this season, of 'recovered greenness'.
George Herbert's honesty (today we might say transparency) and wise learning from his own heart's journey, make him a reliable guide and trusted companion along the harder miles on our own road. Or so it has seemed to me.
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