Last night, I sat in an expanded circle of women. Twenty of us came together from the two core spring groups of Women Writing for (a) Change – Vermont to share what we have been writing for the past several months about, around and through the paradoxes of our lives. Another thirty-five or more women gathered in growing circles to receive and complete the evening’s exchange. Seated in the gracious and accessible gallery of the South End Arts and Business Association we were embraced with the inviting warmth of Carol Norton’s current exhibit – appropriately enough titled “Winds of Change.” By candle- and gentle track-light, we gave voice to the soft and hard edges of life, the arid and the flowing, the hidden and discovered. We heard it all.

On my morning walk I noticed a squat stump, shards really of its former self, low-slung in the dank of early spring. Rising proud from its ragged edges, a hemlock sapling barely a foot tall  braved its determined way toward the light flickering far overhead.

What the trees know is what we come to learn through our own rooting in the rubble and stretching toward the sun. We heard it last night in major and minor variations of rage, desperation, longing; in the keys of adapted, broken open, released. We have heard it over and over in the wake of the unimagined attacks on innocent hard work and joyful celebration that are the hallmark of Boston’s annual marathon. Light trumps darkness. Regeneration emerges from destruction. We begin anew each day. Some with hurdles we might never have imagined; all with the same spirit, the same desire for life.

Boston (Photo credit: Bahman Farzad)