The Promise of Spring

Steve Hayes commented on yesterday's post from his Southern hemisphere home in South Africa: 

 And I heard noises outside my window this morning and looked out and the wind was swirling the dead leaves. I turned the heater on for the first time this year, and somewhere reported the first snow of the season.

This reminder of the reversal of seasons that comes from living on different halves of a big round ball mixed with the last few days of rain and brought to mind one of my favorite songs; The Waters of March/Águas de Março, by Antonio Carlos Jobim.  Jobim wrote two versions of the song.  The Portuguese original is a stream of consciousness meditation inspired by the rains of March, which in Brazil signal the end of summer.  The second, English, version is not so much a translation as a Northern hemisphere adaptation.  Here is a bit from the lyrics:

The plan of the house, the body in bed
And the car that got stuck, it's the mud, it's the mud
A float, a drift, a flight, a wing
A hawk, a quail, the promise of spring
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart
A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road
It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone
A snake, a stick, it is John, it is Joe
It's a thorn in your hand and a cut in your toe
A point, a grain, a bee, a bite
A blink, a buzzard, a sudden stroke of night
A pin, a needle, a sting a pain
A snail, a riddle, a wasp, a stain
A pass in the mountains, a horse and a mule
In the distance the shelves rode three shadows of blue
And the river talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life in your heart
A stick, a stone, the end of the road
The rest of a stump, a lonesome road
A sliver of glass, a life, the sun
A knife, a death, the end of the run
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the end of all strain, it's the joy in your heart

Reading the lyrics does not do justice to the song, with its deceptively simple syncopation and sweet but melancholy melody.  I counted yesterday and discovered that I own five versions of the song by different artists.  I did not plan this, it is just that I find myself listening to a lot of bossa nova lately.  Perhaps it is the combination of beauty and sadness in the best of it.  Perhaps it is just an urge to listen to music made by grown ups for a change.  The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart maintains in his The Beauty of the Infinite that "Bach's is the ultimate Christian music; it reflects as no other human artifact ever has or could the Christian vision of creation."  This is no doubt true for the big picture.  I see Bach as like the physics and higher math of cosmology and quantum mechanics.  It is true and it is beautiful but it describes a world both bigger and smaller than the one we humans live in.  Here on the human scale the math gets messy.  Coastlines are fractals.  Swirling waters and weather patterns are non-linear, defying easy prediction.  Even the human heart beats chaotically and a "perfectly regular heartbeat is more likely to presage sudden death than good health."  Jobim's little bossa nova about the change of seasons, be it North or South is not Bach, but, for me at least, it speaks of the underlying beauty amidst the ten thousand seemingly unconnected details found in any day in any life if you stop and look around.  Not a meaningless chaos then, but something more:

A float, a drift, a flight, a wing
A hawk, a quail, the promise of spring
And the river bank talks of the waters of March
It's the promise of life, it's the joy in your heart