Artwork: Adam Craig, The wild flowering
Slowly, slowly the sun warms, the day lengthens, the earth greens. Delicate and strong, plants spear through the earth, snowdrops followed by primroses, crocuses and daffodils, wood anemones…
The scent of the air shifts and we arrive at this delicate point of equilibrium—Spring Equinox or Alban Eilir (‘The Light of the Earth’) is one of only two moments in the year when night and day are in perfect balance. This threshold between Imbolc and Beltane is a beautiful place to pause as the energy of the year heightens, a space full of symbolism and depth.
In Druid lore there are stories of the Druid’s egg, a symbol of fertility and new life, which is protected by a hare — most likely the origin of Easter eggs and Easter bunnies. And although the Christian festival that coincides with Jewish Passover is now known as Easter, the root of this name seems to be in the elusive goddess, Eostre or Ostara, associated with Spring Equinox.
At this balance point, we rest before the sap rises, before the shell of the egg bursts into new life, before the expansiveness of summer. There’s an excitement in this—so much possibility, but there can also be discomfort. New possibilities, birth, flowers erupting through the earth, buds bursting on trees—these things take effort… labour… nothing is birthed without an extraordinary process, sometimes painful, sometimes taking us to our limits and edges, expanding our wells of grief as well as our ecstasy, the tender shoot exposed above ground after the long journey.
Through the winter we have turned inwards, our world or focus more indoors, more inward. And now it is changing and we may feel unprepared, uncertain of walking across the threshold, this balance that holds for such a little time before we move towards Beltane, the third instalment of Spring after the stirrings of Imbolc, the equilibrium of Alban Eilir towards the cusp of summer, towards such different energy.
For a moment everything is in balance — night and day, light and dark, rest and motion. This is a moment to breath deeply before we continue on the path of the seasons, the path of our own life’s seasons and the unfurling of the next buds of our creativity.
As the world bursts with new life, how will we nourish and honour our bodies in this new season?
After the long winter, we are surrounded by resurrection in nature. How do we take this narrative into our own stories, finding ways to reclaim our injured and sick planet from the maw of destruction, finding ways to tend to love, ways to hold grief, the contours of its memory and longing, while finding spaces for gratitude and joy?
How do we use this season of greening life and rising sap to inform the voices we raise in solidarity with those caught in genocide or enslaved labour, theft of their water or bearing the brunt of ecological disasters set in motion by those who have consumed too much of the earth’s resources?
In begins in our journalling, in our writing, in our inward stories emerging, finding voice and rising like sap to join the voices of other stories. It begins when we believe the world can be a different story and that all of us have lines to write for this new and life-giving tale.
It’s Spring, but Spring isn’t an end point, it’s a process, a stage on the journey, that evolves in cycles as much, or more, than in straight lines. It’s a stage that moves outwards, expansive, reaching, a moment along the path when we tender our offerings with openness, when we commit to living in hope for a world that aches for a Spring of radically generosity and transformation.
Each season brings a new perspective on savouring life and cultivating wonder. In Spring the abundance of life, the extraordinary strength of flowers and buds that seem so fragile and have such short spans, the intensity of life as birds nest and tend their young, insects busy themselves with a thousand tasks for the ecology and biodiversity of the earth, give us moments rich in meaning and if we pause in these moments, we begin to construct lives of wonder, lives that are permeable to other creatures, other people, lives grounded in the balance and equilibrium of this season. Wonder makes us realise that more is possible than we might have imagined. Wonder, like hope, prevents us from becoming jaded. As Kierkegaard put it,
Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.
This Spring, how will you nurture a sense of wonder in your life and in your writing? How will you practice gratitude, generosity and wonder in the face of the unexpected, the moments when equilibrium is harder to find?
I think we do it by being bodiful. We hear a great deal about mindfulness, but living in hope and wonder requires that we honour our bodies, that we see their continuity with all life, that we embodying our writing so that it doesn’t become something cerebral and abstract, remote from the rising sap of life and the cry of all creatures to have access to this life.
Great art, great writing, great forests, great seas — all require connection. Disembodied minds won’t advocate for the earth or raise a voice for those suffering. The urgency of the times we live in, both politically and ecologically, cries out for writing and life that is bodiful.
Breathe in. Feel your breath reaching every part of your writing body. Become tuned to its blockages, discomforts, tensions. Tend to your bodily self. Walk in the world that feeds your senses, that nurtures your imagination through the wonder of its scents, tastes and colour, its textures and songs.
You are not a mind (subject) looking at body (object) but a whole creature, an intelligent, conscious body who is nothing like as separate from the world as contemporary individualism suggests. Where the individual mind-body complex ends and the rest of the world begins is one that has exercised philosophers for generations. I’m with Husserl who asserted that the lived body is the centre of experience, with Merleau Ponty who said,
The world is not what I think but what I live.
We don’t understand the world from the perspective of disembodied mind, but through the body, the primary vehicle of understanding. Mind is rooted not only in body but it in the body’s interaction with the world. Ultimately, distinctions between mind, body and world are arbitrary. To quote Merleau Ponty again:
My body and this something that I’m touching are merging into one another because this touching that I imagine I am doing in fact is a mutual process which is being done to me at the same time.
Writers, creators, all of us, are ‘enworlded bodies’ imagining new stories into being, writing the resurrections we want to live, tending to the stories of other creatures, plants and humans who need us to listen, to care, to witness and raise our voices with theirs.
When does the fabric of your life feel woven from wonder and hope?
How can you tend to your story, nurturing yourself, soul and body, to dwell with wonder and hope, even in dark time?
Spring is a time of wild flowering. It is a time of life bursting through the surface and into the warming light and air. What one thing can you do today to assist your own wild flowering and where will it lead you?
Spring is a time to look outwards even as we tend our own stories, because these things are not opposites, but an intimate interwoven rhythm. Spring is a time for looking at what has survived the winter, what is blossoming that we can tend in this harrowing yet beautiful and bountiful world. Spring is a time to move from our inner landscape to the story of the land, the story of those whose land is being destroyed beneath them even as their own bodies are destroyed. Spring is the time to look to the Earth, our Mother, for the deepest truths and our truest connections. When we do so, how can ecological mayhem or genocide make sense? Spring equinox is a threshold that invites us to step into a new story, a story of connection and compassion, of resurrection beyond our imagining.
Happy Spring Equinox. Beautiful, inspiring words of wisdom.
Thank you for these gentle reminders. This read was a balm for the ailments . Gratitude