APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH, T. S. Eliot wrote at the beginning of his masterpiece, “The Waste Land.”

And so here we are, this first day of April.  For the poet, April was cruel for its “breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with the spring rain.”  April, it seems, is this strange mish-mash of winter and spring, new life in the remains of the old.  I get that.  Even in my own mid-30s kind of way, I get that.

April should be an interesting month for me.  Lots of things, good and bad, are pending.  Things with work and friends, people making important decisions.  I’ve got two trips planned this month, one with the school to Maui and another to the West Coast for reasons I’ll write about sometime soon.  And in the midst of that, I’ll be turning my next prime number: 36. So three things already frame the month for me.

The trick, of course, is to be awake and aware through it all.  In winter we are prone to slumber, and so the early of April can leave sleep in our eyes.  But spring is here and now and we should be awake for it.  That’s my prayer for the next thirty days: to be awake, to pay attention.  These spring days we can’t afford not to.   And here’s a song about such a thing from the band Mumford & Sons.