Spring is a difficult season for me in Minnesota. There is so much potential for new life and yet there are so few signs of it. A couple weekends ago Brad and I took our dog Sola up the street for a small gathering led by an Ojibwe Elder to bless one of the 130 trees our city will be taking down in our neighborhood.

As much as spring is about new life it is also about death - sometimes forced deaths and other times necessary deaths. One thing in common is that death always offers the opportunity for new life. So as we blessed the tree above I spread my offering of sacred tobacco in honor of what is yet to become of this tree's new life.

Death has been my greatest teacher and my greatest agent of change. It has a way of jarring us back into the reality that life is short and there is only so much time to do something with what we have been given.

Spring is a season that calls us out of hibernation into action, fertility, creation. What has died in your life of recent? What new life is waiting to be created in you?