a wild flowering for Spring
We’ve arrived at the Spring equinox, almost three months into the year, which makes me think I must have blinked and missed something. Time is anything but linear, but at the Equinoxes there is this extraordinary feeling of balance in time. There is something gracious about the evenness of day and night, light and dark.
In the Celtic cycle of the year Spring is so important that it comes in three phases — there’s that first rising of sap and the early flowers at Imbolc — we feel Spring stirring but it’s often still cold, there may be sudden frosts and winter storms. But the days lighten and lengthen until we get to this balance point — a moment of poise, a space to pause on the threshold of a more expansive season which blossoms into the energy of Beltane at the beginning of May —Spring in all its fullness heralding Summer.
At this moment of equilibrium the paths, like time, are non-linear — three spirals I’d like us to explore:
what has come through the winter
time as a cycle
how we respond to the expansiveness of this season
This has been a long winter. Here in Brittany, the storms were less in October and the forest breathed relief. December was cold but beautiful — bluest blue skies and snow, which felt rare and wonderful here, but perhaps not for those who had a lot more of it. Then the rains in Janaury and floods into February. Our garden was a lake. Puddles appeared spontaneously in the basement.
We are seeing increasingly fierce weather as the planet responds to the injuries inflicted on her during the Anthropocene. Storms and floods are not only features of the natural world but also the political and social landscape of this bruised world.
By late January and into February my energy felt scattered, pulled in many directions. I’d find myself sitting down to do a piece of writing and then getting side-tracked into something completely different. I love Winter for the days of hibernating, the slower, shorter days, but its earthiness and contraction can become heaviness, stuckness, muddy-mindedness.
Spring is a time for clearing the channels and letting things flow, which might include emotions and grief. Do you have a journal to hand?
How do you want to move into a new phase and rhythm of Spring?
When the wind and the storms quiet, what songs do you hear calling you forward?
What are you leaving behind in the earth this Spring — perhaps dreams or plans that need longer to germinate or you are not sure of, or rhythms of Winter that don’t work for you as the earth warms…?
What have you sheltered through the winter that you want to carry into the Spring? They might be small moments of epiphany, dreams, imaginings, creative projects, ways of relating to the world or particular people, habits that serve you well…
What new story do you want to blossom into?
In The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s (translated by R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti), Nietzsche, wrote this affirmation:
Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence — and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.
A joyous affirmation isn’t something we might expect from Nietzsche. Saying yes to the moment, realising that all life is so intimately connected that the whole universe has come together in that moment of joy.
I sometimes stay in a remote cottage in Ireland that belongs to a friend — it has a big peat fire and is utterly silent and at night completely dark. The first time I stayed was just for a week but in my memory of that week is a huge period of time — I got a lot of writing done, read several books, walked and did yoga daily — time just seemed elastic. I’ve experienced the opposite at other times. Sometimes when I’ve taken a longer period to retreat and write, it’s felt like I’d get up, do hardly anything and suddenly it was time to cook dinner.
Time can be an abstract and amorphous concept as well as one that triggers our feelings of guilt and overwhelm. We’re used to thinking of time as being in short supply and fragmented, so that even in moments when we have choices, time can feel like it’s slipping away too fast.
Time is the medium we live in — it is all we have and it matters that we delight in it as much as possible. In The Scent of Time, Byung-Chul Han considers that we are living in an era in which it’s common to experience time as fragmented events that don’t connect into a meaningful narrative of life. Instead time appears frenetic and marked by dyschronicity, that is, the
experience of a time that is whizzing without a direction.
When time is unmoored and narrative starts to fragment, how does it effect us, as writers, as humans, as people trying to live well and connect to all of life? It’s a wrecking ball. So how can we change our perception of time?
Han suggests that we need to return to or discover anew a sense of ‘mythical time’. This is the time we encounter in stories, and which gives narrative meaning:
You need only let your gaze move here, move there, in order to read the sense, the meaningful order, off it.
Story, poetry, non fiction, oral story-telling — whatever the genre, narrative gives us a glimpse of mythic time. This doesn’t need to be epic or romanticised. It doesn’t need to be a static and inflexible tradition, but a living sense that we can find meaning in story without it handing us all the answers.
What it does need, Han suggests, is a rehabilitation of the rhythm between the life of endless doing and activity, and the contemplative life. Few of us are free to leave the world behind even if we wanted to, but most of us can make space for some contemplative time. For deep rest and lingering. We are not merely labouring beasts of burden whose worth is assessed in how much we produce and consume.
Balm of contemplation
1/4 cup shea butter
3 tbsps of infused oil (daisy, St John’s wort, mugwort or you can simply use olive oil)
3 tbsps of beeswax pellets heated together in a Bain Marie
Take off the heat and add essential oils of:
clary sage 20 drops
lavender 20 drops
Melissa 5 drops
rose 5 drops
Pour into small jars or tins.
We’re borrowing the infused oils from the early summer and beyond — bringing in some warmth, but also some deep relaxation and lots of joy. And the herbs here speak both to the flow of Spring and the soothing of slower, cyclic, earth-centred time. Herbs of healing and of dream, herbs of joy and hope, herbs of clearing and restoration, herbs of the heart.
Spring asks us to expand as the light grows. And in our challenging, precarious world, expansiveness can feel vulnerable.
In the powerful and disturbing folk story of ‘The Handless Maiden’, a young woman is first ‘accidentally’ sold to the devil by her father, then loses her hands. Later she marries a king and is given silver hands and has a child, but things go wrong again and she ends up once more handless, living in the forest with her child. It’s a story with endless layers of metaphor and meaning about wounding and healing. The maiden’s hands finally grow back when she risks her life to save her child from drowning. Wholeness comes after reaching out for the sake of someone else.
Now Spring is here and it’s a time to grow back our hands. How do we reach out as writers for the sake of others, for the earth, for who and what we love?
Spring calls us not simply to get back ‘into nature’, but to realise that we are nature. We need to live bodiful lives in order to thrive.
If ‘The Handless Maiden’ is the archetypal story of our wounded selves in need of healing and touch, perhaps Rapunzel is the story par excellence of isolation from the natural world and from relationships. Many of us spend a lot of time on screens, sedentary and indoors. Perhaps especially so in winter. The internet can be a wonderful way to connect, but we also need to breathe in the trees, listening to the plants, tend relationships in person.
In the Druid telling of Spring Equinox or Alban Eilir (the light of the earth) there’s a ritual of ‘breaking the shell’ based on the use of eggs as symbols of Spring. The egg is a safe and nurturing space, but at some point the chick needs to emerge. At some point the space inside the egg is not so much a healthy boundary containing all that is needed and with space to grow, but a constricting cage.
It’s time for some expansiveness, time to greet the Spring. There is darkness and turmoil out there. But there is beauty and kindness and community too. And our writing is part of this expansiveness — the witness and stories we give to the world.
So reach for your journal (or however you want to write).
We’re going to map the flow of our lives, our writing, our creativity. A map of our practice.
Before you begin, what is your weather at the moment? It might be raining outside but feel like summer within or vice versa or something completely different…
Now begin your map.
Think about your writing broadly in these areas:
Ideas/first notes
Sketching early drafts
Consolidating, final drafts, editing
The fallow periods between projects or sometimes in their midst
Draw these phases as a map — each one is its own locality
Add places on the map that represent key areas of your life — it doesn’t have to be everything but perhaps areas like:
Daily rituals
Work (however defined, it doesn’t have to be paid)
Relationships
Diet / physical health
Important pursuits
Emotional / intellectual / spiritual support (in whatever ways these are meaningful to you).
Now you have the map, add the weather. Maybe it’s snowing across your whole landscape. Perhaps there’s a hurricane in one area and balmy hot days elsewhere.
Are there any rainbows? Deserts? Storms?… They might be multi-coloured or only come in blue or black or white…
What is the flora and fauna of each place?
Get really creative. Is your editing process a forest or a desert, is it populated by snakes or bears? Is your diet a garden or a zoo? …
At the end, if you want to add key words, go ahead. We’re writers — we love words. But let the images lead you there. And perhaps it may be all images.
When my youngest son was born, a friend drew a picture of daffodils and irises with a verse from The Song of Solomon written over it:
See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come
We’d have to be living under a rock to think life is this simple, but the earth that nurtures us still brings the spring. We’re here, in this world that has sunsets and daisies and abundance… this moment we can say, yes.