Rising – Hill, We Bloomed In Spring

Edie Hill – We Bloomed In Spring

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Sunrise, Tuesday May 12

Looking out our windows.
In awe of nature putting on its spectacular Spring Concert – blissful and blind to our Sheltering Stresses. 
The woodpecker, our new neighbor, is telling us she loves our quieter city. 
Much more civilized.

And, suddenly, we are deep into May.
Good morning!

Woodpeckers and birds make us think of Edie Hill. 
(Her Carolina Parakeet was our Rising w/ on March 19. That seems an eternity ago.) 
We Bloomed In Spring is what we call a little Edie piece. 
Based on a big idea of St. Teresa of Avila.
A brief, celebratory scene. A smile. 
Like St. Teresa: an Ecstasy.

We love to sing We Bloomed In Spring because of Edie’s command of – no, her accord with – rhetoric; how conversations shift, how our inner dialogue has its own story. Her music makes rhetorical detours that feel exactly like what our brains do: we lunge forward with urgency... 

I will just say this forthright:

...then stop and rethink, tempered. 

The apparent seasons of life and death
our eyes can suffer;

There’s another reason we love to sing this piece. It’s due to the peculiar ending; it feels both final and unresolved. Expectation and satisfaction. (Again, we ask, how does music tell us these things?) It causes us to pause after the final chord before any of us take our next breath, as if the pause were written into the piece. 

“Apparent seasons,” indeed...
Yes, our eyes can suffer those seasons, but it is easier when the season is Spring, and our eyes are noticing, perhaps for the first time in years, just what an astonishing show nature produces...

...when viewed through a window.

- The Whole Team @ The Crossing

We Bloomed In Spring

music by Edie Hill 

words by St. Teresa of Avila  
translated by Daniel Ladinsky in Love Poems of God

recorded live in concert The Crossing @ Christmas
December 16, 2018 at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services

written in 2014 for Philip Brunelle and Plymouth Congregational Church

video art by Beth Haidle

* * *

We
bloomed in Spring.

Our bodies
are the leaves of God.

The apparent seasons of life and death
our eyes can suffer;

but our souls, dear. I will just say this forthright:
they are God
Himself,

we will never perish
unless He
does.