Wood Frogs and Spotted Salamanders (Showing Up)

In the eastern midlands, winter and spring hold hands, briefly, but with a poignant intimacy fully intended to wake the body into awareness of itself. Sap softens, remembers its fluidity, and begins to rise. Wood frogs and spotted salamanders lift long-still legs and begin to make their way out of an underworld slumber of sorts, charging into a warm rain-pelting night with nothing but the earnest drive for procreation to guide their way. They show up, so many, all at once, in a little pond that agrees to be there for them, briefly. Life announces itself as having once again laid claim to the surface world. For me, this is it. This particular night and the following day, I too will give myself over to the possibilities wrought of emergence. What can come of that? We live in ceremony.

What do you show up for? I show up for surprising things. Often, I’m astonished by what I show up for. Interesting, isn’t it? How we can get led in some way on some particular day to some place in which we are suddenly ourselves doing exactly what we were meant to do but couldn’t possibly have done the day before. I think, perhaps, this is why we pay so much attention to the weather—even have weather people map it out for us every morning. Somewhere, deep inside us, there is a memory of an agreement that we made to show up when the conditions are just right. I think life depends on it.

— Jamie K. Reaser