As yet, there are few signs of green unless you look close underfoot. The exceptions are daffodil shoots and the fine border of dandelions, now in full bloom, wedged between the parking lot asphalt and the brick side wall of the supermarket, putting on quite a cheerful display. Most encouraging.

It may look and feel like Mud Season, but nonetheless, it's really spring. I know this because when I drove home from the city on Tuesday evening, there they were incoming: the Canada geese. In a forty-minute drive, I swear I must have seen at least 500 of them in flight: six flocks of 50 birds and more, plus innumerable smaller groups and pairs. Whichever way you looked in the clear soft blue sky, there were dozens of groups and pairs of geese beating their way north towards their evening resting places, steady and purposeful.

I don't know much about bird physiology and behaviour, but I do know enough to understand the point: heading north to their summer breeding grounds allows the geese to raise their young in safe places with a plentiful supply of the right tender marsh plants. All done by instinct and patterned behaviour. As a reproductive strategy, it clearly works--works so well, in fact, that the sheer numbers (with goose byproducts) are growing to be a Problem and governments are talking about a goose cull.

But a part of me still believes that there's magnetism or magic involved: that something about their breeding grounds draws them, that anything so dumb as a bird couldn't possibly know what it's doing. And that makes the migration strange and wonderful. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. People always stop in their tracks and look upward when they hear that familiar, indescribable ga-whonking, partly because it means the wheel of the seasons has turned again, but mostly because there is Mystery on the wing up there.

How do the geese know, year after year, to come back to this particular series of fields between the highway and the river? There are a couple of fields in particular that are almost wall-to-wall geese at this time of year--hundreds of birds stage there, resting overnight. If you're driving into town in the morning, you see them burst up from the muddy ground in great masses, filling this part of the sky. In mid-air, flapping madly, they sort themselves out, the black confusion quickly resolving itself first into sub-groups and then into the great Vs that so entrance us year after year, fall and spring. Then they head off, splitting into smaller and smaller groups as they get closer to home.

We aren't birds: our hard-wiring doesn't make decision for us the way it does for them. We're given the choice of heading off on the Great Journey toward God and self and meaning, or of staying put, wherever we are. We don't have to migrate as these birds do. In fact, the costs of moving on may seem too heavy. The end of the journey it is at best hypothetical, and home looks very cosy. Many people do apparently never choose to set out on that particular road. Why should I? What's the point? It won't pay my taxes or lose me 20 pounds. And who cares what lands are out there, really?

Well: sometimes home leaves us, some major crisis propels us forth onto the road, like it or lump it. Or sometimes the simple black-and-white truths that we inherited stand up against the painful colours of this world, and we realize that they won't do; we have to find something better. Or just as often, we simply find that cosiness palls. There's something missing. The things we thought would satisfy us don't really--rather like lunching on candy. The initial sensation may be sweet (and pleasantly naughty) but afterwards, we feel vaguely unsatisfied and under the weather. Sometimes there's a sort of inner itchiness, or a gentle aching desolation where something ought to be, or a strange dry restlessness that longs for living water.

The geese know to head north at this season. We aren't always as sensible, when we first feel the instinct to move out on the road. This world is full of a fascinating array of godlets, starting with our own egos. Maybe at first, we'll search for simple, immediately gratifying answers. A bunch of people in my town are into a particularly silly form of pseudo-Native spirituality. I don't think there's much harm in it--it's just the old table-rapping spiritualism of the last century dressed up in Dances-with-Wolves clothing. But I also don't think it's going to scratch anyone's spiritual itch very well, at least not for long. Ultimately this sort of "spirituality" lacks that solid clunky feel of the authentic. It's cotton candy, not meat and potatoes. It provides no real answers to the human condition, and no real comfort either.

We hear of a "hunger for spirituality" out there, and ultimately, I believe, it will figure out that this God, the God of the great religions, is the only god worth travelling toward, and that this God is well worth the effort. This isn't a new discovery on our parts; it is coming back to an ancient wisdom that we, in our hunger for more romantic other ancient wisdoms, have chosen to ignore, because it isn't particularly trendy or exotic. We refuse to believe that God can dwell in our own backyards. Surely it can't be that obvious? But our own ancestors, whatever their failings, weren't always nearly as blind as we think they were. They could be arrogant and short-sighted and wrong in the details, full of sinful human nature and their own cultural biases--but they were journeying toward God in all honesty, and are we so very different?

We are not journeying solo; we are part of a mass migration, although we may not be able to see the others from where we stand. The company of pilgrims, living and gone-before, has something to offer that we need. I find it comforting, knowing that so many saints have been on this particular road. It reassures me that the landmarks are well known--even the byways and detours and cul-de-sacs. They too stepped into potholes and wandered off into the bramble bushes, just as I do sometimes. All of this helps, if you choose to take staff in hand, sling your knapsack on your back, and set out into the unknown, looking for home.

Who would true valour see:
Let him come hither.
Here's one will constant be
Come wind, come weather.
There's no discouragement
Will make him once relent
His first-avowed intent:
To be a pilgrim.

(For Jane C.)