The peepers are back, those invisible frog beings that fill the evening air and the morning stillness with their lilting advertisements for a mate. ..nature’s early edition of the personals. The red wing blackbirds have also returned. Their raucous call is not the most lyrical, but I am enamored of their feisty announcements…here I am, they proclaim, here I stay. Each bird picks the tallest of last year’s grasses, perches on the very top and sways through the serenade. Life returns to the pond. It is a siren call impossible to deny. Tugging on my boots, walking stick in hand, I join the torrent of life spooling up from the panting earth.

My manuscript has a siren call all its own. The challenge of the pages sways before me. March on, it whispers. Answer my call. The peeping of plot and theme and character refuses to rest. As spring marches on the wind outside my door, story soldiers on inside my head.

The drafting of a work mirrors the winter storm, packing a punch, piling up drifts, covering the roads. A wild, white, enchanting mess. Immersed in the rush of inspiration, I sweep ahead, unmindful of the chaos in my wake. My writing, like the land, slumbers, marking time until I and Nature begin to craft again. Marching along, rebirth, symbolic and actual, occurs. In revising, the story becomes clearer, stronger, more beautiful. Just as the first violets of spring signal the seismic changes in the land, the early blossoms of my writing voice give way to new growth.

The marriage of nature and creativity is heady stuff. As I walk the trail, I strain out all extraneous noise and listen to the trees stretching their limbs, to the breeze sifting the woods, to the urgent laughter of the creek. In the mystery of spring there is, for me, always more than a whisper of the divine, and in that moment I find inspiration and resolution. Watching the world come alive again, I renew my belief in the world I am creating.