Dear College Faculty and Staff,

Sunday officially brought us into the spring season. While we did not experience much winter, climatically, we seem to be emerging out of the deepest of the pandemic winter. So this Spring Quarter may feel like a time of both renewal and completion, as our students finish out the academic year and our seniors complete their studies. While we’ll have to start the quarter masked since we have spread across the country and the globe during our spring break, I hope that won’t last long.

I hope you have all had some time to rest and recharge before we head into this exciting time on campus. For this weekend, which may be all the Spring Break you get, I leave you with this poem by Mary Oliver, from April of 1990.

Best,

Daniel

Spring

And here is the serpent again
dragging himself out from his nest of darkness,
his cave under the black rocks,
his winter-death.
He slides over the pine needles.
He loops around the bunches of rising grass,
looking for the sun.

Well, who doesn't want the sun after the long winter?
I step aside,
he feels the air with his soft tongue,
around the bones of his body he moves like oil,

downhill he goes
toward the black mirrors of the pond.
Last night it was still so cold
I woke and went out to stand in the yard,
and there was no moon.

So I just stood there, inside the jaw of nothing.
An owl cried in the distance
I thought of Jesus, how he
crouched in the dark for two nights,
then floated back over the horizon.

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