WAKING WITH SPRING
Warm rays reach long through a sheltering canopy, coaxing a sigh of breath from the saturated wood, earth, and flora. It is the time when the light returns to the land. Mist rises as the forest exhales. I let out my breath, too, among the fauna welcoming new warmth into ready lungs. That which stirs around us stirs within us. I recognize myself in spring’s waking. The wren flitting about the barely budding thicket reminds me - this is no small thing.
After a thirsty winter, it is the nature of stinging nettles to know how and when to reach sunward to sip from the sky. Like the small but fiery plant, people too, instinctively turn winter-paled faces to seek the returning sun. Is it not true that all life orients around the light? All is formed around the presence and absence of it. Every being hears and heeds this call. This time of year, the brightening calls for a collective opening.
It seems the winter is always just long enough to forget the embodied sense of worship at the first touch of warmth upon my cheek. Until that moment, it is only by way of faith that I can know warmth will one day find me again. The days begin to lengthen like the growing stride of the fresh born fawn navigating new legs. In these times, taking back the time to feel the unfurling season is at once a subversive and medicinal act. What is it to surrender to the alchemy of light reaching in? To rest for a good, long while in the immersive hues of red flooding my field of vision as sun pierces through softly shut eyelids. I breathe in. These are the moments. So full they spill over into the next; this is how I am transformed. This is how the seasons walk me home.
Oh, so much of me died away with the winter. I know the fear of erosion, and I have come to know it is a revolutionary thing to be kind. Grief is somehow softened at the sight of young salmonberry blossoms, petals tender and wrinkled. It has always been the way that the returning light reveals the gifts of brave winter work. What remains of me? This too, will be illuminated in good time. I am made new again, in the spring.
In the spring, I lay the flesh of my hand on textured bark, and listen. At first, I cannot hear through the thin roar of the story I would let define me. With surrender, I listen somewhere between what has come to pass and what has yet to be born. The robin’s chatter is excited as they unearth worms - and nearby, a soft rustling gives away a hare moving through the underbrush. I breathe out. I watch my story rise with the mist, before being swallowed by the brightness expanding through the trees. This is how the forest teaches me to forgive. I recognize myself in everything around me. It is no small thing to be here, becoming with the spring.