Opinion Articles

SOUL MATTERS: The power of spring makes us open our yes
By Sr Val O'Hara
Sr Val O’Hara is a Sister of Mercy with a deep appreciation of the power of the creative arts.

In these heady perfumed days of early Spring, the no of the darkness of winter yields to the ever birthing yes of creation. The no of frost and cold and bare trees, hard earth and slanting rain gives way to the yes of greening willows, bold burnished daffodils and soft shy snowdrops. We find our yes in flourishing gardens, startling showers of pink and white blossom and gorgeous golden wattles. Yes is in the warmth of a sun gentler than the summer version yet more daringly present than in preceding days. Yes is in the call of the thundering ocean beckoning us to trust, and in the lengthening of the days as we stroll along the river bank of Throsby Creek or the Foreshore, smiling yes in companionable joy on those who walk with us.

We only have to saunter through the bush to rejoice in the release of Spring aliveness in the colour and scent of flowering shrubs and vines, brilliant or surprising against the quieter greens. Our desert also suddenly bursts into life.

Wildflowers which looked dead to the world,
bloom overnight to reveal by late morning
a gigantic multi-coloured mural.
Swollen creeks overflow and fuse with each other
to completely swamp the parched red landscape.

(Patrick Oliver, “Birthing: its Timing” in The Track Back: The Spirit within Australian Creation St Paul’s, Homebush, Sydney 1993)

This primordial yes is an echo of the universal yes of the earth to its Creator. It calls forth from us another echo, the yes of dry and brittle hearts awakening to newness, to delivery, to birthing in vibrant and vital ways. Yes, to the Creator, yes to each other, yes to the ever challenging call of the Spirit in the everydayness of our lives. Yes to bright new opportunities to value our own colourful beauty; yes to shifts and changes which project an understanding of the work of the Creator within, and a resounding yes in joy and anticipation of all the seasons of our lives, of the revealing glare of the summers, of the overcast shadows of the winters, of the spectacular spiralling letting go in the falling kaleidoscope of autumn and yes to the knowledge of resurrection, of the eternal yes, the infinite yes mirrored for us in every Spring.

I thank you God for this most amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky: and for everything
which is natural which is infinite
which is yes

e e cummings