Spring is a messy season. Like so many transitions, things are in flux, not one thing or another but both and everything in between. The snow is melting, the ground is muddy, bulbs, trees, and everything in between is bursting, competing for moisture, warmth and light.
It’s as if the whole earth, or at least our neck of the woods is in puberty, not one whit concerned with manners, merely flirting and flaunting all it’s new found greenery and spring attire. It is riotous and uproarious. Forever the metaphor for hope and renewal, in spring we emerge yet again from the cave of our darkened days back out into the lengthening ones. Some years, in this arid place, we too are blessed with growing rains and the comfort of moisture, to test our roofs and umbrellas.
But what of us who did not spend winter months in hibernation, who have forgotten that winter might be a time to ‘bear in’ to our interiority, to knit or read in front of the fire, to cook with friends or simply be attuned to the gentler rhythms of our lives. How well can we come back out into the promise of earths renewal when we have not taken the time to hear the voice of our own inner promptings, our own deeper refrains and urges?
How do we as a culture celebrate this coming out, when we never took the turn in, when we have forgotten that seasons ask different things of our bodies and our psyches, that living the seasons may involve more than changing the filters on our heating systems or changing our clothes.
I live in a place that is sunny at least 300 days a year. For the most part, this is a glorious and happy thing, but this year (as has been the case before) when many of my friends were saving their miles for that mad dart down to Mexico to escape the raw cold, I took myself off to the rainy Pacific NW to soak in some rain. To watch the fog roll in across the roiling ocean, to sit around the table with friends who opened jars of preserves, lovingly canned during the summer months for just such a day. I yearned for wet, to turn in, to be quiet to walk the beaches alone, to write, to hear the gentle but persistent rain on the outside patio stones, to see the many shades of grey and yellow of a heavy laden sky, feel the feint efforts of the weak sun attempting a breakout moment and usually failing. To see the land naked, raw and full of promise. To feel my own upwelling gratitude for another season of imminent renewal.
May it be so for us all,
With love to you this early spring time.
winter/ spring
1.
ginger steps
white weight
buries branches.
cold the constant
companion
memory thaws.
2.
every morning since
our longest night
i watch with hunger
the shy inch worm
of returning light
relief!
3.
thrusting
through late
winter’s snow
fragile heads
bright brash
red on white
masters of trust.
