The archetypal image of spring, it would seem, is the first flower bud sprouting from the cold wet earth. It’s an image of struggle, of life’s unremitting urge to seek the light. And it’s a miracle, every time.

But this image, of the Mississippi River in late February, when it started to get warmer after a record-breaking run of cold, is the image that’s resonating with me right now. I see an internal struggle, the liquid part of the river that wants only to flow struggling against the frozen part at the surface.

I don’t want to belabor the metaphor, but there are a few ways to go with it. Do you want to think about the hard shell you’ve created to get through three months of cold and twelve months of isolation, and how maybe the cracks are showing? Do you want to see it as a model of the transition we’re all thinking about making, some of us even starting to make, and understand that it might not go smoothly? Maybe you wonder whether whatever it is in you that flows, which perhaps the hard shell was created to protect, is even under there anymore.

This image doesn’t speak to me of a smooth transition. It’s going to be a struggle. But it’s one that the river makes every year, and so do the flowers, and it looks like sometime this year, so must we.