Spring is my favorite season. The birdsong, the colors, the blooms, jasmine-filled breezes. All of it. Yes, please.

We have yet more rain here in Cali, but even so, the birds are singing their hearts out. And the buds are forming, and the bulbs are up. And the hills are so beautifully green. And somewhere close, the bears are stirring.

Enjoy this spring poem by Mary Oliver.

SPRING

Somewhere

a black bear

has just risen from sleep

and is staring

down the mountain.

All night

in the brisk and shallow restlessness

of early spring

I think of her,

her four black fists

flicking the gravel,

her tongue

like a red fire

touching the grass,

the cold water.

There is only one question:

how to love this world.

I think of her

rising

like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against

the silence

of the trees.

Whatever else

my life is

with its poems

and its music

and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness

coming

down the mountain,

breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—

her white teeth,

her wordlessness,

her perfect love.

Mary Oliver, House of Light

Spring is also all of this —the wild, the fecundity, the passion, the thirst, and the quenching of thirst. The one question: how to love this world. Life’s yes. This, please.