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“The whole country burns orange in the dusk.”

This issue of The Calendula Review honors dormancy, that extraordinary ability to enter a death-like state of suspended animation, use this to weather the chill of winter—the insect that mid-freeze, stops, then continues its journey with the thaw.

In medicine, we harness this trick–induce a coma to let the body heal. But some people cannot just stop when the polar vortex of politics descends upon them–the physicians and nurses, veterinarians and technicians, the faithful public health practitioners I train. “Rest” is about that moment in a busy clinical or research day where suddenly, everything comes to rest for just a moment. It’s about being able to lean in on that space, use it for rejuvenation.

In some ways, “Roses in Winter, Robin in Snow” is about the opposite–about being too present in a moment of destruction. Last winter, when it was clear the political winds were turning in a way that was far more destructive than anything that had occurred within my (not short) lifetime, I looked out the window. There, on the birdbath, as if in mockery to the ice caked on its rim, was a robin.

Spring embodied.

“I want to warn her not to stay, but in truth, / I need her, her bright plumage and her hope.”

Robin is my prayer-poem, my hope that among those seeds, the next generation whose germination came to a sudden, devastating halt, there will be some able to bury themselves deep and emerge, brilliant, when the healing arts again have a spring.

I saw a robin on the birdbath earlier this week, right before a snowstorm and plunging mercury:

What do I notice today? Not just the color at the chest, the white kohl about the eyes.

What I notice are the buds on the paperbush in the background, the flowers that will open in February, another herald of spring.