“…Spring-time is here! / And what is this in it and from it? / The grass of spring covers the prairies, / With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, / And the pale green leaves of the trees prolific, / The arbutus under foot, the willow’s yellow-green, the blossoming plum and cherry.

… Here I sit long and long, envelop’d in the perpetual rich mellow bumble-bee symphony, / Gathering these hints, the preludes, the blue sky, the grass, the morning drops of dew, / The lilac-scent, the bushes with dark green heart-shaped leaves, / Wood-violets, the little delicate pale blossoms called innocence, / Samples and sorts not for themselves alone, but for their atmosphere, / To grace the bush I love—to sing with the birds.”

The foregoing are two stanzas from Walt Whitman’s longer poem called Spring.

Virginia Woolf said once what I increasingly feel: “I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.”

Here are some images I photographed in my neighborhood last spring (it’s still a bit early this year for all this blooming) but, anticipating the reawakening of the trees, flowers and grass fills me with a sense of renewal. Hopefully, in these times of harsh storms, earthquakes, war and massive suffering, spreading autocracy, racism, antisemitism, hate and polarizing politics, these images offer a measure of hope.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said: “Never despair! Never! It is forbidden to give up hope.” And Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey reminds us: “Hope is the active conviction that despair does not have the last word.”

Enjoy the images!