Food for our Minds and Spirits: Shaking Off Our Antlers

The annual daffodils and tulips started coming up weeks ago, in these unusually warm February days we’ve had. As of this week, the weather is supposed to get a bit colder, with some snow in the forecast. Our seasons have been very out of character, lately.

I think Spring is an underrated season. Often, it gets maligned as “mud season,” or pigeon-holed for some kind of almost schizophrenic split between “basically Winter” and “not Summer yet.” We really are penned in by binary thinking, and it’s no different when it comes to a season that includes blossoming flowers, but flowers coming up through snow.

But the Spring also signals a deep sense of vulnerability. A flower’s shoot is green and delicate. It is a season full of eggs and newborns. It’s a season when animals of all kinds shed their skins and start to regrow antlers once they’ve shed them in the late Winter. In fact, an amateur drone photographer caught an extremely rare sight of a bull moose shedding its antlers. When I watch it, I note that he shakes them off, and immediately runs, as if startled by the new nakedness.

Maybe we feel that way too, and maybe that’s part of what makes us have mixed feelings about the Springtime. When we feel vulnerable and exposed, especially when we’re coming out of dormancy or a sense of safety, it can make the world feel like a scary place.

So, maybe Springtime is a particularly good time to work on our bravery and our empathy. It’s a time to admire the tenacity of tulips and fully see the way even a powerful moose feels scared and exposed when it loses its hard antlers.

Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**

–––––––––––––––

Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD