Amid uncertainty and fear, finding hope and magic in spring

This is part of a series of columns by Michael Enright, reflecting his more than 50 years as a journalist and CBC broadcaster covering Canadian and global news events.

After the third, corrosive COVID-19 winter, slight but important signs of spring and renewal hold out hope. Grass is greening up, sidewalk skaters are back, temperatures hit double digits from time to time and the COVID-confined tempt the odds and gods with patio dining and walks in the park. 

Despite what calendars teach, May is the true start of the year. The rest is commentary. Spring reaches deep into the soul. Above all, it promises. It stirs the embers of hope, the only viable thing left in Pandora's box after she loosed evils upon the world. May almost, but not quite, kills the memory of February.

It is hope that brought tens of thousands of humans back to Rogers Centre to gaze in wonder at the first home opener of the Toronto Blue Jays since 2019.

Anticipation builds for Blue Jays season

3 years ago

Duration 1:54

There’s plenty of eager anticipation around the Toronto Blue Jays, heading into the baseball season with a star-studded lineup that includes slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and outfielder George Springer. Hopes are high the Jays will make it to the World Series for the first time since 1993.

Hope never dies in the viscera of the true baseball fan. Look at the millions of Chicagoans who left their earthly homes without ever seeing their Cubs win the World Series. They lived in hope till their final minutes.

For reasons best left unexplored, the game of baseball has inspired some of the best writing in every generation.  You don't read great books about football or, with the exception of John McFee's brilliant A Sense of Where You Are, about basketball.

Baseball will energize your heart in May and break it in October.  But we live in hope in that far-off country of Maybe This Year.

Spring is a time of renewal and new beginnings. But for some, the stately among us, it can mean the end.

The magic of trees

The note from the city arborist was as concise as it was clinical: "Due to dieback in the canopy and extensive decay at the base, this tree has been scheduled for removal." 

Dieback is to trees what cancer is to humans.

The tree, our tree, is a silver maple. It's a hundred feet tall and a hundred years old. We have lived in its benevolent shade for nearly 30 years. It would come down, the guy from the city told me, sometime in the next couple of months.

Growing up as a downtown city kid, I never paid much attention to trees. They were for climbing, hiding behind or falling out of. If you grew up in an apartment as I did, a tree is something you saw only in parkland.

But there is an ineffable magic about trees. It may be their steadfastness, that the tree is there in all weathers, silent. It may be their resilience, that they lose the glory of their leaves in the fall and bounce back in May. Almost giddily. 

It may also be their relationship to us. Theodore Roosevelt put it nicely: "To exist as a nation, to prosper as a state, to live as a people, we must have trees."

The Greeks say: "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in."

Peter Wohlleben is a German environmentalist and forester and something of a tree philosopher. He wrote the astonishing bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees. My CBC Radio producer suggested an interview. I scoffed. After all, he said trees communicate with one another, that they form families and communities and in troubling times, they take care of each other.

I mean, come on.

I spoke to Wohlleben for the better part of an hour. He explained in convincing detail how a healthy tree can transfer nutrients to a weaker tree that has become diseased, which is in a curious way comforting.

Sunday Edition29:27It sounds like a fairytale, but forester Peter Wohlleben believes trees really do talk to each other

Trees have feelings. They communicate with each other. They even have distinct personalities and memories. Michael talks to the author of The Hidden Life of Trees.

When he made a trip to British Columbia, Wohlleben met with David Suzuki and spoke to large crowds about the importance of maintaining the old growth forests.

Sadly, this spring brings more killing in Ukraine, more ravaging forest fires in the American southwest, more fear about what is to come in a world seemingly beyond the care and command of mere mortals. In the floods of uncertainty is there anything we can count on?

We have to look for joy and celebrate it where we find it, whether it's in the games people play, the glory of nature or just the simple understanding of what it means to be alive.