Did you forget about the spring mud sisters? Don’t lose sight of the real sight. There are things we can’t know, can’t touch, can’t understand yet.The sisters know how to wait, and enjoy the waiting.

We want to know, to understand, to predict because we think it will somehow save us from the terrible discomfort of uncertainty. Knowing is a safe harbor where we can see all ships that come and go. Knowing is what lets us sleep well and deep. It is a guarantee that we will be taken care of. So what when the knowing is scarce? What when the clear songs are garbled and chaotic? What when the sky is thick with fog or night or insecurity? What then? Where is our comfort?

Cue the mud sisters. They delight in the murk. They revel in unknown. Their playground is stones unturned, roads thick with brush, walls of dark oak and ledum. They search for the deepest mud unstepped by early spring feet. They circle around untouched places, not to dig them up, not to know them, own them, stake their claim. No, the mud sisters are interested in helping the earth keep her secrets for as long as she needs them.

We are far too obsessed with knowing things.

These sisters want to hover over like fairy godmothers, our forgotten places of stones unturned, untouched, unknown. They protect what is still too fresh for light. There are places in the earth and in us, that cannot always be thrust into the light. There are places in the mud that are better left in the dark. For now. Or maybe for always. That is not for us to decide.

I stepped out into the sphagnum moss and let my toes sink deep. I heard them singing. The songs are low so you have to close your eyes and bend like grass to the earth. But they can be seen. The mud sisters, circling around with joined hands, holding space for what must be protected, what is too new to be born, too tender to be thrust out into the sun. They hum and whisper in a way that sounds like mud gargled in the back of your throat, but in a sweet way. They make sounds like bogs. Squish, splat, hmmmm. They are watching over our secret things.

This spring, be like the mud sisters. Seek the hidden places. Don’t seek for the reasons you usually do, so that you can throw back the covers, shine the light, and make something “useful” of this secret stuff. Do not violate your sacred secrets in this way. Instead, circle your attentions around them softly. Curl in a boundary between that hidden tenderness, and the outside world. Protect something you do not fully understand yet. Be the barrier, the shell, that allows something its secret, for who knows how long…