Consider troubles like a spring frost. Spring always surmounts the frosts, and peonies do bloom. Spring is never daunted. There can only be mere interruptions to it. Spring always is confident of its triumph over winter. For spring, survival is not enough. It must be accompanied with the blossoming of lilies like trumpets that call out, “Spring has come.”

Whatever snows may cover you, they do not last. They do not survive. And you triumph. You outlast them. The coldness of winter turns into the sun of spring. Winter gets transmuted into spring. Winter gives spring just the push it needs to present itself. The winter cold makes the spring flowers that much sweeter, in perception and actuality. The cold is not needed for contrast. The cold supports the spring that inevitably follows it.

I am not extolling the cold fronts of winter. I am extolling the rites of spring. And I am reminding you in a kindly way that spring always comes. It steps on the heels of winter, and it arrives no matter what just the way you arrive on My doorstep. Hail the inevitability of spring. Hail the inevitability of you as a glorious spiritual being.

It is not that you win over anything. It is that you follow your course, and you arrive. I suppose We can call that victory, and yet it was not a race. And if it could be considered a race, it is a race rigged. You will always come in first. There are, in fact, no losers, beloveds. There is only downward thinking.

Oh, beautiful souls, would that you would know with certainty that spring is always vibrant and winter only an accumulation of snow that will be shoveled, or will melt of its own accord and with the consent of the rays of the sun. Spring is always now, beloveds. Snow melts into spring, and the streams of life are overflowing like love streaming in your heart.

And so, now love the Earth that rolls itself up like a snowball and rolls down a hill called life and revolves itself into day and night and into the seasons where it merely dons different clothes.

And you are a whirling dervish who spins in tempo to earth changes and doesn’t notice the spinning, and so your chakras spin, and so the earth spins, and so there are seeming revolutions of the sun, and so there is grist for the mill of vagrant time.

Imagine the Earth within its crust a fast-growing giant tree. And you are the roots of this giant tree, and you are its branches ever-rising to the Heavens above, ever-growing, evergreen, ever springing to Heaven.

Imagine the sun shining on this pastoral scene. Imagine the sun’s rays nourishing this growing tree. Imagine the clouds like sailing ships beckoning to the tree. Imagine the rain answering the trees’ thirst. Imagine the skies opening up and revealing a picture of the world that few have seen, and now the tree grows taller. It grows all the way to Heaven and makes its home there, establishes itself once and for all, sits itself down, puts its feet up, relaxes, reads the newspaper, smokes a pipe, makes conversation with all the angels who serve it tea and crumpets, and I come in and sit down too, and Earth and I are companionable, comfortable in speech and in silence, old friends who like to be together for old time’s sake as we look out the windows of Heaven and see the beautiful timeless spring as it blossoms, blossoms on an Earth, lighted from within all the Beings who believe they inhabit Earth and have not yet discovered they are in Heaven.