Wake Up, It's Spring

How can it be?

You wake from sleep to find

the whole business is starting up again.

The routine so familiar you know it by heart,

a well worn path trod year after year

yet remaining somehow eternally new.

New like the first light in the eastern sky,

when birds begin calling from far and near.

All life is in motion now because spring is here.

How can it be back again so soon?

When did winter end?

It doesn’t seem so long ago

you sought refuge in a quiet place,

settled in softness and slowing down

with the shortening daylight hours,

letting go the last rags of care

from a season spent and over.

A restless wind was whispering lullabies

to the setting sun when you closed your eyes

for just a stolen moment.

Now you find it begins anew,

everywhere all at once the surging of life

pulled upward by an ascending sun.

Bees are working in the cherry flowers,

toads trilling lustfully in the pond,

buds are swelling by the millions

and the greening of the ancient earth

is like a magic cloak beginning to unfold.

You feel in your bones the ache of growing old

while spring is forever young.

Here it comes again,

you'd stay down but you can't resist.

Rise up, rise up and take your place

among all the creatures great and small

with no choice in the matter,

who must bend to the labor of the hour

and be swept up in the swelling tide.

You can't remember how many times before it's been,

this starting and surging and straining to begin,

but it’s time to wake up now and face the spring.

This entry falls somewhere on the line between the end of year three in the Curator’s Journal and the beginning of year four. Starting out, I thought the Journal would run for two or maybe three years — there wasn’t supposed to be a year four. Starting out, I was at the foot of a mountain, looking up and guessing what it would take to reach the top. The top of the mountain is pretty near after three years of climbing, but we’re not there yet.

This is good news, if you like reading the Journal, because it means there’s more to come. How much more is an open question. Year four probably won’t be a full year, although the Journal might well continue publication for the rest of 2025. There is an end out there somewhere, and we will reach it eventually.

It may seem to some readers that the Journal has thus far been a meandering menagerie of disjointed musings. If so, I confess to intentionally setting it up to read that way. Instead of following a linear progression from point A to point B to point C and so on, the Journal has been simultaneously moving forward on several fronts. I had my reasons for taking that approach, but at this stage of the game it is time to start bringing matters into clearer focus.

Readers who look at the home page of the Journal will see something new. There is now the beginnings of a reorganized way to access Journal entries based on content categories. These categories delineate the different thematic threads that have been running through the Journal all along. This will allow readers with a specific interest in bonsai specimens in the Arboretum’s collection, for example, to see all of those entries collected in one place. The same is true for articles about the bonsai garden, history of bonsai at the Arboretum, people who’ve been key supporters and influencers, and other topics.

This reorganization will take some time. There is a good deal of content in the Journal now and processing through it to get everything sorted out will be an ongoing process. It doesn’t help that we are currently embarking on yet another growing season, when demand ratchets upward and time becomes a resource as rare as good help and common sense, but we’ll get there. In the meantime, if you’re a Journal subscriber each week’s new entry will continue to be delivered to your inbox. Thank you, as always, for reading.

A tremendous amount of work is happening now in the world of little trees, including pruning, repotting and otherwise preparing for a new season of growth. The following depicts a few specimens made ready this past week and is offered as a pictorial component of an otherwise wordy entry:

Korean Hornbeam (*Carpinus turczaninovii*)

meditationJournal EntryMarch 19, 2025year 4, spring 2025Comment