April 15, 2002

by Linda Martin

This was written for the April meeting of the Klamath River Writers. We were to bring something we had written about renewal.

“I don’t have time for renewal,” I told myself a million times in the last month. Nonetheless, springtime happened all around me. Flowers appeared and the buds of new fruit showed up on Manzanita and plum trees alike. The meadow outside my window turned green and eventually I took myself outside into all that beauty and found a comfortable spot for morning journal writing.

“No time for renewal,” I continued to protest, and yet my life was changing, reworking itself, morphing into something unlike anything I’d done before. I was swept up by the tide of my friends’ and neighbors’ enthusiasm and enrolled in a business class, then an EMT class — then… online… an Artists Way group, design group, and so much more.

My email program crashed this last week, ending my access to the last year of stored email, and though this seemed at the moment to be a disaster, in reality it was a blessing — I was forced to let go of the past and at the same time felt the joy of being released from it. An added bonus — my computer now runs better.

This email release started me over with a fresh, clean, new program, just like all good renewal does. Finally I went outside to the meadow, ready to write about renewal, and at that moment, the spring rain began to fall.