I’ve been through a kind of inspirational winter. Where I once saw greenery and new life and felt light breaking open inside of me, there was for a long while an expanse of ice and snow. Things die in the winter. They curl up and decay and molder and traces of themselves and traces of other things all coalesce until there is only dark earth.
That happens with the imagination, too. Passion, hope, fierceness of belief grow brown-edged, curl inward and crumble.
But “there lives the dearest fresness deep down things.”* The dying and dead things are a humus of memory. And somewhere there is life. Breathing silent, pushing slowly upward.