In any life, there are things that require healing. Often this healing happens in secret, the way winter turns into spring (and sometimes back again).

Sycamore thoughts are exquisite, beginning in the mud and branching into higher math. And sycamore hearts beat with reverential slowness in their capacious woody chests, one beat per human lifetime.

My favorite glimpse was a blaze of forsythia growing up between two dark-clad Norway spruces. The spruces have always reminded me of a certain kind of minister or undertaker, while the yolky yellow interlude was like a kid’s laughter in a stern church.

I do know that light enters at odd times. I’ve experienced it. I do know that the eye finds light — co-creates it — and so the cosmic keyhole that separated and joined the star and my eye tonight was a necessary contrivance of both.

Images and words from recent traipses in the Glen.

Somehow “it’s her birthday” will be stamped on my forehead, or written in the sky with a big sky-arrow pointing down. Does this border on a sort of pleasant paranoia, a birthday persecution complex? It might.

It’s still February, a strange and diffident month. It’s a little scared of its own boldness, so ducks its head, like the snowdrops, and calls down the snow.