As sunlight rapidly lengthens our days, the Earth has awoken into the full flush of yet another beautiful spring. Beginning with wild chives growing amongst the grass and ramps growing wild in the woods behind our home, the warming soil energized early greens growing in abundance. Following the yellow, antique white, and orange daffodils have been Virginia bluebells, bright yellow tulips, purple money plants, white and orange narcissists, lavender-blue creeping phlox, and violets growing in the grassy field. Apple trees, first beginning to bud nearly a month ago, have blossomed with pinkish white flowers, joining an abundance of flowering trees: bright white Bradford Pears, snow white flowering cherry trees, purplish sugar magnolia and light purple redbuds, white and purple flowering crabapples, bright red cherry trees, along with the later blooming Cherokee pink and snow-white dogwoods. With many sunny days of seasonable warmth and calm winds, spring has once again graced the human world with its beauty and promise.

The awakening Earth has already given gifts of its soil: ramps given to a restaurant owner made their way to our kitchen, where we used them for another round of Appalachian French Onion Soup. On Spring Equinox, we celebrated the start of spring with a meal of locally made bread, cheeses, a green salad, and beets and cabbage stored over winter to make a simple but satisfying borscht. We harvested our first Arugula, a favorite of my stepdaughter and wife planted in late winter with our granddaughter and gave it to her Mom. More Arugula has followed, along with Asparagus and Turnips Greens, marking the earliest beginning of what will soon be another season of abundance from the Earth around us.

In the brisk morning chill of Dogwood Winter, a reliable cool spell in mid to late April, I cleaned the greens while the birds burst forth in a cacophony of celebration for the renewing life of spring. Enduring the hard winter, celebrating their loving courtship prior to the wild rut of mating, young hatchlings have followed, born in the warmth of spring. The colored eggs of Easter and the Easter egg hunts of young children ritually celebrate the time that hens begin again to lay eggs regularly and harkens back to centuries ago when we would search for eggs laid by wild birds in the spring.

The joyful songs and mating rituals of the birds celebrate more than simple warmth and the renewing abundance of the Earth—they celebrate the joy of life in sustainable harmony with the Earthly flow of life into eternity. Unlike the contemporary human world, birds and the other animals of the natural world are in the center of the Earthly river of life, living day after day in the rough-hewn paradise of the cold yet beautiful Earth. Neither taking too much nor too little of the Earth’s gifts, the families of the plants and animals around us form natural communities we call ecosystems, living in partnerships we call symbiotic relationships that sustain their species for unimaginable eons.

In the warmth of spring my wife and I brewed a Chocolate Porter, to be opened on the autumn equinox. Once bottled, the porter will complete the set of beer that we will drink beginning on May Day with a Honey Golden and continuing for the rest of the season. While cleaning bottles earlier in the month for another beer, I realized that we have used the same bottles for our home brewed beer for over a decade. Using some quick calculations, I estimated that in the dozen or so years that we have been brewing beer we have probably reduced our emission of hydrocarbons by about 6 tons, mainly through reusing bottles and reducing transportation. Like the other aspects of a life focused on the local Earth, this practice is joyful and fulfilling, but also part of a more natural and less toxic way of life. Integrating my daily life into the cycles of the Earth enriches our lives.

With the growing light bringing forth the beauty of spring flowers and early food, heavenly moments unfold from simple joys like sitting in nature, walking along streets filled with flowering trees, harvesting the first gifts of the garden, and brewing beer in our backyard. Reflecting on the cycles of the Earth, I tell a friend, “Hope springs eternal in the hearts of fools, but spring springs eternal.”

In the long perspective of the Earth, I am considering once again the problem of violent men that interweaves itself in the human world. In my own small face-to-face world, I currently know women who have been or are in relationships with abusive men. The stories of families I know—ranging from my original family to acquaintances met through work—have often including physically, sexually, and/or emotionally abusive men and, much less often, abusive women. Many of the women I have known who endured abuse in their adult life grew up in abusive parents or siblings and are facing once again their early trials. Sometimes with little support from those around them, they are challenged to creatively learn a life lesson of self-preservation and self-love that was absent in their childhood home.

Seeing the parallels between relationships in childhood and adulthood draws to my mind a second parallel, between the secular psychology that observes that most of us cyclically repeat trauma until we learn to escape it and the spiritual viewpoint that we are living many incarnations in soul clusters, living a cyclic series of lives with fellow travelers. From the spiritual perspective, we choose to incarnate with previous life partners and soul mates to seek a higher, deeper connection or to work through past traps that we must learn to escape. The past lives of our childhoods, repeating in some form in our adulthoods, are our chance to free ourselves from the hardships of our past while building on our strengths.

The challenge of violent men in our communities is rooted in millennia of patriarchy, in which the right for the patriarch to be violent to his own family is legally recognized in the same way that presidents, kings, and emperors claim the right of life and death over the people they have power over. This reality forms the past lives of many of our childhoods and is repeating itself in the adult lives of many in our personal worlds. Evolving new relationships, through supporting empowered women and children, is a central renewal of our historical moment as much as the work of spring is turning the soil of the garden, setting in good compost, and sowing seeds. In the longer view, the millennia of patriarchy’s desecration of the family is a brief moment eclipsed by the eons of the Earth renewing itself with the annual cycle of spring.

Looking at this long perspective, the relationships in and around our homes are part of the spiritual evolution of people leaving past lives in patriarchy and learning life lessons to escape the cycles of abuse and violence of the past. For women and children, struggling to live empowered lives with supportive, loving, and gentle partners is as essential to the future of humanity as ecological sustainability. By doing this for our personal lives, women and people who love them are helping bring their lives and all of humanity closer to the center of the heavenly flow of Earthly life into eternity. In this way, women and children overcoming past oppression is central to our collective fate.