dual personalities

In the bitter cold of winter the trees stand bare and seem to be dead. But in the spring, they burst forth into leaf and flower, and the first fruits begin to appear. So it was with the Master’s death and resurrection, and so it is with all who faithfully bear the burden of suffering and death. Though they may seem crushed and dead, they will yet bear beautiful flowers and glorious fruits of eternal life.

–Sadhu Sundar Singh

Being means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Ah, the last day of February–it is warming up but the clouds are back. Our flyover weather guru Dave Murray tells us that the “see-saw pattern of the winter” will continue into at least the beginning of the spring season. It was ever thus. Yesterday I returned a book to our west campus library–walking the block and a half there and back without a coat. The wind whipped my hair around and I arrived back at my office with that wind-blown, right-off-the-range look–a disheveled old lady. Well, I do the best I can to stay “sheveled,” but sometimes it is a losing battle.

It seems comfortable to sink down on a sofa in a corner, to look, to listen. Then it happens that two figures standing with their backs against the window appear against the branches of a spreading tree. With a shock of emotion one feels ‘There are figures without features robed in beauty’. In the pause that follows while the ripples spread, the girl to whom one should be talking says to herself, ‘He is old’. But she is wrong. It is not age; it is that a drop has fallen; another drop. Time has given the arrangement another shake. Out we creep from the arch of the currant leaves, out into a wider world. The true order of things – this is our perpetual illusion – is now apparent. Thus in a moment, in a drawing-room, our life adjusts itself to the majestic march of day across the sky.

–Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Woodcuts are by Walter J. Phillips and Erich Buchwald-Zinnwald.