Tim Herd

Today’s vernal equinox briefly bathes the planet in equal amounts of daylight and darkness. And with the shift (in the northern hemisphere) from dark dormancy into animated ambience surges an inner revival for growth and development.

In response to greater sunlight, internal pressures in the trees commence the rising of nutrient-laden sap from storage in the roots upward to fuel the new season’s growth spurt in the twigs.

Biologically, this is an ongoing riot of chemical reactions, motivity mechanisms, physiological changes, and vital exchanges with external resources that together produce the unfolding of buds and leaves, the development and ripening of its fruit, and all eventual successive generations.

It’s time for a growth check. Back yourself up against the wall or doorway—like you may have as an eager youngster—and inscribe a new level against your previous benchmark. What progress have you made since you last checked?

Psychologically, personal growth and development is a direct response to the amount of time spent in the light of new knowledge, building the internal pressure necessary to generate changes in our thinking, actions, and vital interactions with our external resources—that together produce the eruptions of newly developed talents, blossoming of new skills, a maturing of virtues, and an enduring impact on future generations.

Heed this brief missive of springtime revival from the woodlands. What possibilities are you growing?

Full disclosure: I never went to kindergarten. It didn’t exist in my rural township in those dark, early days soon after the ice sheet had receded from North America.

And so I never learned all those things that people learn in kindergarten: Things like… like…

Hmm. Maybe that’s the problem right there.

In the late 1950s, educational progress in our locale consolidated a dozen one-room schoolhouses into a “modern” elementary building. So a few days after I turned six years old, I started First Grade. My teacher, Mrs. Sham, wore what used to be called “coke-bottle glasses” (because the lenses were so thick), and what I called “teacher’s perfume.” (I have never met anyone else so distinctively scented in my life.)

I was an impressionable kid, and I learned many life lessons from Mrs. Sham: (more…)