Returning with the Birds: Defying Gravity in a New Season

On awakening, meditation, and hearing the music that was always there.

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This morning, I heard something I didn’t realize I had been missing.

Birdsong.

Not faint. Not distant.Full-throated. High-pitched. Insistent.As if the trees themselves had awakened and decided to sing.

I sat very still and listened.

At first, it almost startled me — the sharpness of their warbles, the sheer volume of life pouring into the air. My winter ears could barely take it in. But then something inside me responded. Something rose.

I felt myself lifting into happiness.

After months of gray skies, cold air, and muted energy, the sound of birds felt like oxygen returning to a room that had slowly grown stale. I didn’t realize how quiet it had been. I didn’t realize how much I had adjusted to the silence.

And then there it was — life, unapologetic and bright.

Near the patio, in the rock bed where everything still looks dormant, a lone daffodil is pushing its way through stone. Just one. Yellow against gray. Delicate, yet determined.

That flower has no idea how symbolic it is.

It simply knows it is time.

There is something about spring that feels especially personal in midlife. We know what winter is. We have lived through seasons of contraction — grief, loss, hormonal shifts, fatigue, reinvention, uncertainty. We understand what it means to feel quiet, to feel paused, to feel as though parts of us have gone underground.

But here is what the birds reminded me this morning:

Nothing is gone.It is waiting.

Gravity tells us to settle, to shrink, to grow heavy. Spring whispers otherwise.

The birds do not apologize for their volume. The daffodil does not ask permission to emerge from rock.

They rise because it is their season.

Perhaps happiness in this stage of life is not something we chase. Perhaps it is something we notice when it returns.

A sound.A shaft of light.A single bloom in an unlikely place.

This morning, I did not try to improve myself. I did not strategize or strive. I simply listened.

And I felt myself come alive again.

If you are in a winter season — emotionally, physically, spiritually — stay close to the small signs. The first birdsong. The first green shoot. The first moment you feel even a flicker of lift.

They are not accidents.

They are evidence.

Spring does not rush. It unfolds.

And so do we.

Debra