I opened Rilke's Letters on Cezanne today.  For some reason these letters have been on my mind as spring begins its slow forward creep.  Later spring will come bounding and rushing, moving boulders in the creek bed, spreading an abundance of blossoms.  But now, at the beginning, it progresses by "littles": stretching light a bit further into each evening, dropping calves in the field, lifting tiny, fragile shoots of green underfoot.

In this season, my mind is on Rilke's letters because they are luminous, making every best idea in me want to stretch and send up exultant green shoots.  In 1907, Rilke wrote to his wife about a visit to an exhibition of Cezanne paintings:

Today I went to see the pictures again;  it's remarkable what a surrounding they create.  Without looking at a particular one, standing in the middle between the two rooms, one feels their presence drawing together into a colossal reality.  As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all.  The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand among them as ready as possible, you get the impression that they are doing something for you.

Phew... did you get that?  Did you feel that spring breeze lift your hair?  Rilke is saying that standing receptive among these Cezanne paintings gave him the impression that he was being changed.  Isn't that exactly how it feels being among these first outlays of spring? The first vanilla scent of ponderosa sap or the morning lilt of the meadowlark or that iridescent flash from a passing mountain bluebird, these are all doing something for me.  The simple truthfulness of these sights, sounds and smells, educate me.  But in what? There's no syllabus, no course notes, no test, no way to measure how I've changed or even that I'm changing.  This is a province that resists proofs.  It's a territory navigable only by intimations, suggestions, best guesses, hopes.  

I know that the meadowlark sings its song for its mate, or its territory, or because the sun is up and it is such a day.  Its singing has nothing to do with me - it is not for me.  And yet, it works on me.  The other day, on a run in the hills, the trail took me from one meadowlark to the next. With each thrilling song, I felt myself lift right up and nearly sail over the grass.  The songs felt like "the knot in the rosary at which ... life says a prayer" (Rilke again).  How good that we don't have to search up and down and haul ourselves over barren miles to find a teacher.  Already, our education is all about us, in sounds and sights and smells, underfoot and overhead.