The Great Command

The cruel fingers of winter loosen their grasp; released, the willow burgeons into a mist of green, and the warming air pulses to the beat of returning wings.  From the trumpet of a daffodil sounds the call to Spring, the great command: April, April.

For April's indeed a command; it's the Roman word for "open."  And by this command an eternal mystery is revealed.  April.  The manifesto of Spring is declared, and all that live are called to make appropriate response, to open themselves to life as life opens to them.

Surely no more joyous duty was ever mandated, and yet T. S. Eliot called April "...the cruelest month...mixing memory with desire."  Nor was he alone in this thought.  Cyril Connolly referred to this line when he commented, "Spring is a call to action, hence to disillusion."  But then, these men wrote as adults, and April's best understood by children.

For the children are on the side of life, unquestioningly.  They don't allow pain or disappointment to dull their sense of adventure.  They don't permit despair or frustration to keep them from reaching again and again for what they desire.  They know, as many adults have forgotten, that being alive is a process not an end.  For them the new experience is a promise not a threat, and they are unwilling to leave any venture untried.

They don't forswear ugliness, for in the forswearing they lose beauty.  They don't deny defeat, for in the denial they lose victory.  They're on the side of life in its totality, for they know life can't be had in part only, any more than death can.

April, cruel?  As children we didn't find it so.  And somewhere, beneath the weight of maturity, are buried the children we once were.  Buried, but not dead.  Perhaps if we dig through the rubble of fear and disillusion, we can still free them.  The world's as full now of new and exciting moments as it was years ago.  And life‑-in its totality‑-is still waiting.  April.  April.