snowmelt Archives - Owl Medicine: Shamanic Healing

A Taste

If you’re a person who pays even the slightest attention to weather predictions, you couldn’t escape the exhortations to get outside and enjoy today’s balmy temperatures. Spartacus was especially eager to supervise the filling of the birdfeeders if it meant he could sit on the porch and bask in the sun. Aaah, a taste of the season when we shift our ‘office’ outside.

Spart was ready to make the move today. And I can’t say I was far behind. The opportunity to lift my face to the sun and actually feel warmth was delicious.

I made a point of getting outside today because the temperatures are supposed to drop again for the next several days. Not that it’ll be ultra frigid or anything. But it’ll go back to 30s and 40s.

The yearning for spring is growing in all of us, I suspect. It’s as if we’re all a bunch of maple trees with our sap rising or daffodil bulbs defiantly poking our heads out of the still snow-covered ground.

Photo: L. Weikel

Walkabout

In celebration of this first whiff of spring, Karl and I did our first ‘walkabout’ in what feels like many – too many – months. A walkabout is what I call our four mile trek, leading us past wolfhounds and through horse farms, to name a few of the highlights.

It almost felt like a homecoming, it’s been so long since we took that route.

Snowmelt Waterfalls

The gradual way spring has been poking her toe in on us has made the melting of this winter’s copious snows less of a flooding nightmare than in other years. Nevertheless, the roadside streams and field runoffs were flowing copiously this afternoon – and the cacophony of their voices almost as much a harbinger of spring as my beloved peepers.

Next week the temperatures are supposed to reach into the low 60s. I’m ready.

Photo: L. Weikel

(T-268)

Wild Afternoon Sky – Photo: L. Weikel

No Lamb Today

Without even going outside this morning, I could hear the runoff of melted snow coursing along the side of our road. Water rushed through a tunnel of compacted snow, amplifying the sound of its frenzied quest to join either the Tohickon or the Delaware, whichever was quickest and easiest to access. The sky was gray but the air was mild, content to simply do the job of melting winter’s whites. I truly thought I had this ‘first day’ pegged; but alas, March was no lamb today.

Oh sure, every once in a while the sun tried to push through and shake things up, but it was a heavy lift. The day just felt sort of blah.

Only when I had to run out to the post office in the late afternoon did I start rethinking my assessment. Snarling clouds were building in the west and I sensed a growing energy that felt distinctly leonine. I stopped by the creek to pay my respects and everything just felt dismal and swollen.

Swollen Tohickon – Photo: L. Weikel

Overflowing her banks – Photo: L. Weikel

Transformation

An hour later, Karl and I were heading out with Spartacus. The weather transformed before our very eyes. There was the barest hint that change was coming as we rounded the first corner. Those dark billowing layers of slate gray clouds had almost magically given way to a speckled sky of marshmallow puffs.

The longer we walked, the more dramatically everything shifted. Another mile under our belts and overhead the puffs poofed and their background of blue became the main event.

As we crested the final hill, the power behind the shift made itself known. We kept looking behind ourselves, thinking the whooshing sound we heard was an approaching car. But no, it was the wind, and that wind started buffeting us, moving us along, and most definitely ‘blowing the dust off’ our attitudes.

Speckled Sky of Puffs – Photo: L. Weikel

This Evening

As I sit here writing the title of this post, ‘No Lamb Today,’ the catalyzing wind has only become wilder and is making our normally melodious wind chimes clang vociferously. (I should probably bring them in.) The lights have dimmed at least four times this evening, but we’ve mercifully been spared a complete loss of electricity. So far, anyway. It’s a wonder.

At the moment, it feels like the wind is angry and determined to root out and whisk away anything that isn’t grounded and in it for the long haul. Its roar is unmistakably declaring that March 2021 is coming in like a lion.

May it clear away the Covid! Help us all start fresh. It’s a new month – a month of new growth, of hope, of life returning to the surface of our consciousness. The month that brings us spring.