Rite of Spring
Mar 20, 2026
☩ ☩ ☩ An Existential Excavation ☩ ☩ ☩
Every year, for more than 40 years now.
It’s the most sacred day of my year—this day of perfect balance, when life begins anew in the Northern Hemisphere.
I’m up before dawn to be at the ancient mountain altar, to watch the sun rise through the same V in the vertical rock face that it does every year.
The journey is short, about two miles, but all of it is very steep, and parts of it are literally vertical. There are no marked trails, no guideposts to show the way—just a memory of the way back.
This place is remote, miles from the nearest road, and the trail is deeply rutted after the recent heavy rains. I park my four-wheel-drive truck at the base of the mountain and look up at the route. The mountain is embroidered with tiny, delicate flowers that will be here only for an instant—beautiful even if no one sees them—and then lost to the brutal summer.
Most of the route is merely difficult—steep bouts of loose shale and decaying granite—but parts of it are treacherous. To reach my destination, I traverse multiple areas of crumbling rock perched above a precipitous drop to the valley floor. A misplaced boot or weak grip would result in gravity ending me long before anyone would know I was gone.
For the last few years, the thought has crossed my mind that this could be the last trip up the mountain on the first day of spring.
Today, approaching 70, I manage the journey without difficulty, although more slowly than in decades past. It is unseasonably warm and unusually humid for this time of year in the Sierras, and numerous tiny insects come to see what they may gain from my presence.
I have made the climb in rain, snow, gale-force winds, and thunderstorms, but this time the weather is mild and the flowers are blooming. I take my time to appreciate their presence and give thanks for the fact that I am here at all.
There is no prize for this climb, no accolades or social media bragging rights. There are only a handful of people who know I do this every year, and most of them probably forget which day it is.
So why, then?
Why make this climb that seems to get a bit steeper each year? Why risk venomous reptiles and unforgiving gravity just to watch the sun rise?
At some point, life seems to lose its sheen. The grind of survival and competition, repeated thousands of times over thousands of days, numbs us and causes us to forget where we are and why we are here.
We lose track of what we are.
So I remind myself that I wasn’t put here to take it easy. I’m not here to zombie away my days, passively waiting for the end of this beautiful story.
It has always been important for me to believe in something bigger than myself, to have a purpose that transcends my petty fears, desires, and anxieties. I don’t claim to fully understand the existential exigencies that allowed me to manifest, no matter how briefly, but I understand that it is a statistical impossibility that there is a “me” to ask the questions at all.
I do understand that this gift of consciousness is pure grace.
Occam’s razor relegates the mathematical possibility that I am a random assembly of amino acids to zero. And there are billions like me.
But a billion times zero is still zero.
So I climb.
I climb because it is hard.
I climb to remind myself that I am alive.
I climb to reach a place that was important to those who preceded me by ten thousand years.
I climb to sing songs in that place in dead languages, to stir energy with forgotten formulae, to venerate the pervasive vibration of life.
Each vernal equinox, I make the drive—no matter how long, the climb—no matter how difficult—to remember, and to give thanks.
I have no fear, because I have thus far been blessed with the ability to continue. And I could do far worse than to end this magnificent story in this sacred place.
And when the climb is done, the words spoken, the songs sung, and the rituals performed, I climb back down again.
But I am different, which is the whole point.
The pounding of my heart and the steady rhythm of my breath remind me that I am.
The majestic mountains and fleeting flowers are unbidden and unearned gifts that fill me with gratitude.
I am overcome with wonder at this world and the fact that I am a part of it, for a time.
This year, I decided to extract a bit of my life experience—a glimpse of this most sacred day—and submit it so that it might become a part of your life experience.
And now, I’m going to make some lunch and pet my dog.
My novel, The Calling is available now in print and as an eBook.
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- JWW
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