No Going Back

April in Maine by May Sarton

The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.

There are moments in life that crack us open—when we realize that turning back is no longer an option. Maybe it’s a decision made, a truth revealed, or simply an internal shift we can’t ignore. We are awake now, and nothing looks the same.

May Sarton’s April in Maine captures this in-between space: the stark, unchanged world outside contrasted with the wild, undeniable movement within. The landscape still looks like winter—brown fields, bare trees, patches of dirty snow—but something new is stirring. The tree frogs begin to sing, breaking open the silence of the cold, ushering in what’s next.

This is how change often arrives—not all at once, but as a knowing deep inside us. A whisper of something different. A pull toward something new. And even if everything around us still looks the same, we can feel the shift. The moment we acknowledge it, we realize: there is no going back.

Transformation doesn’t wait for permission. Once we are awake to it, we must decide how to move forward. We may not have a clear map or timeline, and the world around us may not yet reflect the change happening inside. But spring is coming. The frogs are already singing.

Where in your life are you being called forward? What has already begun within you that cannot be undone?