Coordinating our compasses in March

March is crowded with holy days. Lunar New Year reminds us that something has already begun beneath the surface. Even when the fields look bare, the year has turned. Growth has started underground.

Lent arrives quietly after that. Forty days of reorientation. Not spectacle, but intention. The old word is repentance, which simply means to turn, to face the right direction again.

Then Purim bursts through the door with noise and hamantaschen, hats and laughter, a story in which fear does not get the last word. Soon enough, Easter hats will follow, brims wide as spring skies. Different traditions. Different histories. Different prayers.

And yet, in March, they overlap. All of them mark a hinge. A turning toward light.

Some weeks, that turning feels urgent. Gunfire in the distance. Hard conversations. The lingering isolation learned during the pandemic, how easily we retreated indoors, how carefully we guarded our space. It changed us.

Lent’s wilderness reading is not about punishment. It is about sorting out which voice we will follow, which direction we will choose. Not loud power. Not spectacle. Just steadiness.

Chinese New Year says the earth is shifting. Lent says turn your heart. Purim says joy can survive threat. Easter promises light returns.

What would it mean if we coordinated our compasses during this season?

Not identical. Not uniform. Just aligned.

Aligned in kindness. Aligned in restraint. Aligned in choosing not to escalate.

In a small town, love is rarely abstract. It is eye contact. It is checking on a neighbor. It is laying something down, sometimes pride, sometimes anger, sometimes something heavier.

The fields are not green yet. But they are not dormant.

Something is turning toward the sun.

And perhaps, quietly and imperfectly, we are turning with it.