Spring shaketh

Time to spring ahead.
I was baffled just now that the computer says it's already 7 a.m., when I haven't been out of bed two hours yet...  Then I remembered it's time change weekend.

And almost spring equinox. March 19.
The weather's been so weird, I barely know what season we're in. We see-saw between November and May.
But yes, it's getting light out now.
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I've reconnected with an old friend, KG, who I was very close to in the 1990s, when we both made a lot of art.
Yesterday she took me out for my birthday. She chose a couple places I've never been--including a cidery in an old warehouse that also has pickleball courts.
(I'd had no idea that pickleball is just tennis on a short court, played with paddles. So, tennis made easier. I'd thought it was an entirely different sport.)

KG and I drank mango habanero cider and talked half the afternoon. After a long dry spell, making nothing, she's taken up printmaking. It was exciting to see her first prints--vibrant work!––and to sense her excitement at making them.

Creativity can lie dormant a long time...
Its return reminds me of George Herbert's poem "The Flower":

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse?
...
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write. . . .

In my new job, I'm not bursting in joyous bud, but I do feel my heart returning to some equilibrium.
I'm not enraged that people play pickleball.
I would have been a few months ago:
How can you frolic while hell smolders just out of sight?

I'd been working in a coal mine of the soul, where no light reached. (That wasn't my "mood", that was the social reality.)
I don't know... I feel a little stunned, like a pit pony returned to the surface. 
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"Things which cannot be shaken..."

I'd wondered if I'd feel guilty for leaving the thrift store & environs.
I don't.

Maybe I would have if I'd gone to some plushy job? Public high school is not that.
And it's not like there are no problems up here. Hardly! But they are leavened with light and air. 

I don't feel guilty.
I do feel humbled.

Chastened.

Chastened?

What a weird word, but it came to me.
--from Latin castigare--literally "to make pure" (from castus "pure");
"to set or keep right, to reprove, chasten, to punish".

Biblical, eh? Let's see...

"Those whom the Creator loves are chastened. 

.../ See to it ...that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble.

.../ Those things which cannot be shaken will remain."

--Hebrews 12 (Huh--possibly written by Priscilla, a close associate of Paul’s. At any rate, "Few New Testament scholars believe Paul wrote it." --per Zonderan)

Well, I hardly feel "pure", but I do like "those things which cannot be shaken...".
Yes, I feel I've been shaken, like spring shakes trees.