April comes to me without hesitation. She is a cloud, a billow, the tender wafting scent of something not quite here.

And then there she is, standing before me in overalls and an old plaid shirt, her uncombed hair a dark nest for her sweet, pale face. She brushes my cheek with the back of her hand because her finger tips are muddy. “I’m glad you’ve come,” she says. “Walk with me.”

She sets off and I hurry after. Her feet are bare. The ground is soft, mud pushing up through the space between her toes and sometimes long and slender stalks of grass get caught up there and she carries them forward a bit before they fall away. She walks across fields and I follow. She takes me into the wood where it is damp, the light broken and glittery, the earth fragrant, contoured and cushioned.

I am holding on to the sleeve of April’s red plaid. “How do you cope with the overwhelm of abundance?” I ask.

She cocks her head at me, momentarily puzzled by my distress. And then she seems to understand. “Don’t try to pin it down,” she says. “Don’t try to contain it, as if you were bigger than it. Find your place in it. Pay attention all around. Let it wash over you like music. Join the dance.”

I am trying very hard to understand.

“Come my darling,” she laughs, “let’s get lost in the green together.”

We go into the trees. The sun highlights each new leaf. Each has a light side and a dark. The birds are singing in all directions. The path turns and loses itself in branches. There are so many choices. How can you know how to go?

“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” I say.

“Maybe it matters absolutely,” she counters. “Being makes the infinite one. There is both joy and sorrow in this. When a thing is this, and not that – music happens. There is healing in choice. Allow it.”

We choose the path that calls to us and follow it on through the shifting, dappled light.

“Oh!” she gives an exclamation and stops, her body leaning slightly forward, her head turned slightly to the side. I look in the direction she is looking to find the source of her delight. There is moss among the tree roots, tiny stalked yellow flowers. As I bend closer to see I realize suddenly that it isn’t just this patch of moss, she isn’t just looking forward, she is looking in all directions at once, it’s all the light and shadow and shade that floods her eyes, every angled scent she breathes, every bird call and whisper, the press of everything all around, it’s the all of it that holds her. When she says, “I just love this,” she means the all of it that is.

And then there are frogs at her feet, come out of the dark to greet her. She lifts one tenderly and holds him to my chest. My little frog heart, she returns him to me. He chirrups sweetly. “I know all about you,” she grins.

I think it must be true.

OOO