There was no time to lose, no time to waste in rest or play. The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime. - Laura Ingalls Wilder
My endless spring began in the latter half of March, when parts of the world begin to thaw out and when my part of the world continues to swelter. The Mayor of Maui County and the Governor of Hawaii began issuing orders and guidance to help prevent what could have been (and could still be) Hawaii’s greatest public health disaster in the last 100 years.
To backtrack a bit, the first half of March had been by turns hopeful and fearful—there was no pandemic, because there was no disease. The disease belonged to the place we first saw it. The disease was not going to touch America. The disease was going to end America. There was nothing to be done. There was one thing to be done: nothing. We were to stay still, and stay home. To mis-quote Zora Neale Hurston, “our eyes were watching God.” They were, truly. Pastors looked to the depths we could reach to in the quiet. Old friends reconnected in the absence of contact.
On my first day at home, it rained and we baked. We had no idea whether food would keep reaching the islands, especially if there was a disaster on the other side of the Pacific, and so we hid from the future in the brownie-scented present. That was how we began the endless springtime.
Anyone who has worked with plants knows that spring is constant disaster mitigation. Plants can go in the ground for the first time in months, but they also must go in the ground. If they don’t, not only will the window on that particular crop be closed for the year, but the field dedicated to it might very well be lost to weeds. A field lost to weeds can be lost for more than one year (since it takes time to properly clear a field for planting). Those who plant in the spring know that there is never enough time, there is only the time that you have. Everything to be done should have been done yesterday, but yesterday’s work could not have begun any sooner. It is the kind of rush that leaves one feeling motionless, as though the world is spinning so fast that a day’s revolution can cram itself into the space between reaching for the seeds and bending toward the ground. And yet, there is no sense of passing time. There is only the seed. There is only the ground.
April began and I counted days, and fought to get into the overwhelmed Unemployment system. 10% of April is gone. 20% of April is gone. 5/12ths of April is gone. And, even counting, it did not seem likely or probable that the Stay-At-Home orders would lift on May 1st, and indeed they did not. I found a mask I liked, I bought several. We raced against the curve; we wanted to flatten it before it began. Our neighbors to the east screamed that it was a lie. There was no time to rest; there was only time to wait. Acceptance came in fits and starts for all of us. We missed each other. We knew there was no way to be together. It was near the end of April, after an Easter celebrated in our homes, huddled and waiting for the rising Messiah, that the weariness of Spring began to show. We stopped calling the growing miracles “wildflowers.” Now, we called them weeds.
Sermons shifted from hopeful visions of what could be done with the chance we’d been given to thinly-veiled complaining about the lack of gathering, to proclamations of the end. Conspiracy after conspiracy spun itself into spider webs across the internet, ensnaring people I’d trusted to stay un-entangled. The novelty of the Emperor with No Clothes, whose choices have since killed thousands, had worn off. Now, only resolute weariness and battle-tired reminders of the laws of the land were worth looking up for. Near the end of Spoilers Ahead, we talked about One Hundred Years of Solitude and we lamented the solitude of our little islands even as we were grateful for the safety of the ocean. We watched what we had feared for ourselves unfold for our country—the country that Hawaii was dragged into after the Queen halted economy in the interest of human life almost 200 years ago.
Then, the protests began. The endless rush of springtime showed itself in the fields bloodied by forces that answer only to themselves. We demanded an answer, and when the answers were insufficient, more blood was added to the fields. Even so, the same burst-and-silence that had accompanied the beginning of the endless spring echoed itself in the call and cry for justice. The pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands crashed against the evil of racism that has killed millions— both longed for more blood and both were given it, and both also began to lose field after field to those who would not abandon their work to the weeds.
And in all of it, time refused us its passage, until days seemed to be hundreds of hours, while months passed in a week. Headlines spoke of treasons as though they were history when they were last night’s news. #SayHerName changed hands over and over, as names were added until every injustice now exists in the eternal now, the never-ending accumulation of horror that haunts us. The War to End All Wars claimed fewer souls than the endless spring.
Does that make the hope of the beginning less poignant? Does it matter less that we learned to bake our own bread, to protect our neighbor with a simple mask? Can we raise a glass to freedom and raise a fist to fight for it? For my entire church-going life, I’ve heard pastors ask whether anyone would know if the church was closed. Now, the world knows because we are whining about it. The start was marked with encouragement to cover those who were afraid, and to cover those who were immunocompromised, with the protection of a mask. Now, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of mask-wearing and the mask is too difficult. We want to believe that we are almost through the Springtime (it is mid-July, after all). CS Lewis issues a warning in The Screwtape Letters, and elsewhere: do not put a timer on suffering. The call is to be long-suffering. It could have been shorter, it could have been easier, but it is not, and either the things we said and Amen’d at the beginning were false, or we want them to be false because we are tired.
Unfortunately, it is Spring. Tired will just have to wait.
