April represents new beginnings, growth, and renewal, as it’s the first full month of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, bringing blooming flowers, warmer weather, and a sense of fresh starts after winter. The name itself likely comes from the Latin aperire, meaning “to open,” referring to budding plants, or from the goddess Aphrodite/Venus (Aphrilis). It symbolizes hope, rebirth, and diverse celebrations like Easter, Passover, Earth Day. I don’t really know if with climate change that April showers still bring May flowers. Whatever happens, enjoy the gift that nature in her endless generosity gives to us. Happy April!

Southern Living by Kendra Hamilton

I am cut and bruised, my nails broken. I have found love and my lover is ungentle. There’s a many-hued bruise beside my left knee, three on my right leg at the ankle and the thigh, a new formed scar on my left shin where she cut me–she didn’t mean to. But I fear I grow obsessed, neglect my looks—my hair grows wild. This is what it is to love in middle life and I praise God that She has blessed me with a love like this before I die…. To love a garden is to be in love with words: with potageries and racemes, corymbs hispids, and corms. To love a garden is to be in love with possibility: for it can never, almost by definition, ever be complete. To love a garden is to be in live contradiction: ravished by order yet ever open ot the wild. But more than all these, to love a garden is to find your one true lover: for a garden can’t survive its maker, will die with the one who loved it, with only a sudden spary of roses in June amid a derelict tangle of wood sorrel and sumac to tell an eye that can read the land that either of your was ever there.

Edited by Camile T. Dungy

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

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An excerpt from Yoga Gems, edited by Georg Feuerstein

1. We admit the fact that our conventional life is filled with suffering, because we do not know our true identity, the higher Self, which transends space-time and body- mind. Instead we persist in the stubborn habit of assuming ourselfs to be indentical with a fininte body-mind, thus creating the artificial center called “ego.” This amounts to a denial of the truth about human existance.
2. We begin to look and ask for guidance in our effort to cultivate a new outlook that embraces the reality of the higher Self and supersedes the artificial creation of an ego-personality. The means of doing so are varied–from a supportive spiritual environment to uplifting books.
3. We initiate positive changes  in our behavior affirming that new outlook. It is not enough to read and talk about spiritual principles. Spirituallity–Yoga—is a thoroughly practical affair.
4. We practice self-understanding , that is, we accept conscious responsibility for noticing our automatic programs and where they fall short in our new understanding of life.
5. We make a commitment to undergoing the catharsis, or purification necessary to change our old cognitive and emotional patterns and stabilize the new outlook and dispostion, replacing the egoic habit with the conscious practice of the presence of the higher Self.
6. We learn to be flexible and open to life so that we can continue to learn and grow on the basis of our new outlook.
7. We practice humility in the midst of our endeavors to mature spiritually. In this way we avoid the danger of psychic inflation.
8. We assume responsibility  for what we have understood about life and the principles of spiritual recovery, applying our understanding to all our relationships so that we can be a benign influence in the world.
9. Guided by our new outlook, we work on the integration of our divided psyche, allowing a higher Self to gradually replace the ego.
10. We cultivate real self-discipline in all matters, great and small.
11. We increasingly practice spiritual communion, which opens us to the higher Self, in which we are all connected. Through such communion and through continued growth in self-understanding, we become transparent to ourselves.
12. We open ourselves to the possibility of bliss, the breakthrough of the transcendental Reality into our consciousness, whereby the ego principle is unhinged and we fully recover our spiritual identity, the Self. Through this awakening, the world becomes transparent to us, and we are made whole.