Hellloooo, Spring!

A blessingway for the season

So, my friends, March has marched in.

We may be three weeks from the vernal equinox, but Spring is already announcing herself, knocking at the door with her feathered green hand.

(At least, that’s what’s happening here in the southern Appalachians. If you live in the frigid North, I wish you patience as you endure these last weeks of winter. And if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, I glory with you at the arrival of autumn.)

Where I live, spring is peeking around every corner. It starts with my Lenten roses, always the first to flower. Undeterred by lingering cold nights, they open their shy, speckled faces to the weak sun of February. I love them so!

Then there are the other joyful bursts of life I’m seeing and hearing:

• swelling buds on the native azaleas

• the pinkish bloom of maples high on the mountainside

• Eastern phoebe, our earliest migrating returnee, screeching his arrival in that high-pitched voice of his (no need for an alarm clock anymore!)

• The lemon profusion of forsythia in bloom

To celebrate it all, I want to offer a blessingway in honor of spring.

What’s a blessingway?

For this, we can thank my dear friend Janisse Ray, she of Trackless Wild and the treasury of beautiful nature books she has written.

Earlier this year, Janisse asked me to provide a brief opener for each class in her new series, Journaling Place. The course would run through January and February. Since I have a long history of both meditation and nature therapy, Janisse wanted me to offer some kind of meditative grounding exercise that would anchor each session and bring the participants into what I call “the here and now.”

We debated ideas on what to name this thing. Meditation? Breathwork? Grounding? I was stumped. Finally Janisse came up with the perfect title: Blessingway. How charming! What a pretty word! I figured Janisse had made it up, and I was duly impressed.

Later, I thought to research the word. Imagine my surprise when I found that “blessingway” has a specific meaning and a long history that comes to us from traditions of the Diné Navajo people.

A Blessingway is a ceremonial, communal celebration of pregnancy that focuses more on the mother than the baby. During a Blessingway, a pregnant woman’s closest friends will gather to honor her journey into motherhood. They shower her with blessings and offer words of wisdom around preparing for birth and postpartum.

Photo by Jorge Fernández Salas on Unsplash

If we expand on this idea, as Janisse did, we can use the energy of a blessingway to usher in anything new: a life change, an upcoming challenge, a new season in the Earth’s turning.

One of the blessingways I offered during Janisse’s course was a place-based metta meditation. Metta is a Buddhist practice that focuses on generating loving-kindness—the purest form of love because it’s unconditional, non-attached, universal. By repeating phrases that calm the mind and purify the heart, we wish for the well-being of others. We send out waves of goodwill to all beings.

For your listening pleasure

So here, good friends, is my metta blessingway. It’s a place-based version of the traditional metta practice. If you wish, you can read the phrases as you listen to me speaking them. But it works best if you have eyes closed, sitting somewhere safe and comfortable, without distractions, body relaxed, attention soft but alert.

May this blessingway bring joy and peace to you—and to all the beings who are waking up, springing to life as Spring arrives.