You may have noticed an itch, a little wiggle somewhere back behind the stacks of to-do lists and whirring routines in your quotidian mind as of late (at least in the northern hemisphere), something that makes you notice the sweetness in your food a little more, an ever so subtle suggestion that running through fresh grass without shoes on might be the exact prescription for the lull winter’s blanket left in your delights.
That twinkling wiggle is the onset of Spring!
Somewhere between your ears and your heels, you know that Spring is not only on its way, but that when it gets here, you will be called upon by your enduring inner child, your deepest beast, to shake, to giggle, to grow and frolic like the burning flowers of summer that we all were born to be.
Spring is so alive it’s sexy…and it insists on you being that way, too! Don’t believe me, ask the literal birds and bees. They know what’s up with spring. Bzzzness time, that’s what’s up.
Spring is more than sexy time, though. All of that flowing sap and swirling pollen heralds the profound movement and rebirth in our world, and it’s up to us personally to embrace it in all of the forms that serve us. Since we’re talking about the natural world, that rebirth is rooted in the re-purposing of that which was. Nature knows no waste, only passing from one form to another. Waste is a human concept, and not a very useful one, really. So these struggles and growing pains, milestones and victories, will be born of the soil made rich and fertile by the effort, the wins and the losses in our own rear view mirrors.
When I was planting before writing my post about my forgotten potatoes, I went through my annual process of dusting off my gardening tools. The shed door was a little harder to open with dust having blown in under the threshold over the winter and spring storms, and simply time elapsed. I’m also moved to write more, to dust off the tools of my mind and the interpersonal tools in the relationships that make my career more active and more successful. In colder northern climates, you know all about opening up your soil to let in the warming spring air and shake off the icy drowsiness of winter’s soporific.
My bones don’t creak much, but they are sure starting to creak less now that the sun shines our temperatures up into the eighties a couple of days a week. Children all feel the same vigor, the same giddiness as the trees unfurl their leaves and nature as a whole renews her invitation to each of us with eyes to see and hearts to accept what is certainly a courtship with mystery and life itself.
Even the sun stokes our optimism and beckons to us invitingly, waking earlier and going to bed later each day.
But not everything in Spring is new, in fact, it’s only the next turn of the same wheel.
This is the time for what has been patiently waiting, what we’ve been building and letting mature over winters and summers and winters again to finally get caught up in the frenzy and burst into the great race in new forms and motion. After hours of hidden labor and dedication, our winter projects come up from the basement into the sunshine just like our seeds, so tentatively and vulnerably, finally poke their first leaves through the soil, aspiring to the sunshine.
Happy Spring!
E