It’s the end of April and I haven’t yet sat outside to journal. I haven’t sat out to watch a sun set or a moon rise. That speaks to how cold and wet it has been this winter, and how reluctant this winter has been to give way to Spring, a Spring nearly past as we approach Beltane and the beginning of Summer.
I talk of seasons as if they still exist but begin to wonder if they will also find their way into the books of lost words – because I do feel there will be more than one such book. Perhaps we need to start a whole new dictionary, a post-dictionary, a record of the words and when they were last in common usage, when they started to fade, maybe even when they were last evidenced. A reversal of etymology. There probably isn’t a word for that yet, but there probably will be.
Words cease to be used when they become meaningless. I adamantly capitalise the seasons Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, because I believe they are (or at least should be) as meaningful as the days of the week and the months of the year…but their meaning is diminishing. Climate shift is confusing the world, the earth, the systemic ecology that I was born into – it is pulling it back into chaos.
Of course it was born in chaos. It regularly returns to chaos. This planet that we think of as a static thing, we forget that it is a system, a fluctuating being, living on a timeline so long that we cannot grasp it. I try to remember that.
Spring. In the old religion of these lands Spring starts at Imbolc and runs to Beltane. The vernal equinox is the mid-point of Spring. Or was. Even in the more recent scientific adaptations to the seasonal shifts Spring starts about two-thirds of the way through March…and we’re a month beyond that already. We’re well past snowdrops and crocuses. Daffodils are wilting. Stitchwort and bluebells are weaving their way through the woodlands, garlic mustard is shooting its starlike flowers skywards. Forget-me-nots and grape hyacinth and harebells and comfrey and dandelions carpet my garden edges. There are violets. Columbine.
I should not still be in winter-warm clothes and heavy-duty waterproofs. I should not be hunkered down with the heating on and a streaming cold making me yearn for double-doses of vitamins and early nights. But I am.
I have walked. In the wind and the rain, and for all its own enchantment, I am longing for sun and stillness.
I have made a start on tidying up the winter wrack from the garden. On the rare bright day.
To be fair, I even snaffled one warm afternoon on the beach, back against the breakwater, sheltered from the wind, catching the few reluctant rays of sun on skin. I have paddled. That should not be feeling as brave as it does, not this late in the season. But there it is.
I am thinking about this unseasonal Spring because several weeks ago, I pulled a slip from my joy jar that read “stand barefoot on the earth” and I did not expect so many weeks to pass before I did.
To be fair, it is not entirely down to the weather. Cold and wet and knee-high grass and ankle-deep mud (ok, I exaggerate, but not by much) do not sing ‘come hither’ when I can see the next storm weaving its way over the church rooftop, but there is another, an opposite, thing. There is the base-level contentment of my life, the lack of drama in my life (for now at least).
I remember what it is like to need to focus on the everyday blessings, the moment-to-moment wonders, but I hadn’t realised that it has become a memory. That need may return, who knows, but right now it is not one that I feel. On the other hand, it is still something I do as a matter of course, because there is nothing to pull me away from it. There are many beautiful moments, oh-look-at-that moments, shussh-listen moments, get-up-and-bound-about moments.
Don’t get me wrong, I still have the other kind of moments! I was told yesterday that I can still be "quite reactive”. I make no claim to perfection here, but I am in the fortunate position of being able to take life slowly and simply and savour the quiet, and I simply do so.
When I wrote my list of “small joys” and snippeted them into a lucky-dip tureen, I’m sure I thought that I would emulate El Rhodes* and feed one of these into every day for a year, making sure that every day for a whole year had one small joy in it, and then sharing that with the world. That was in fact a stated intention. It didn’t turn out that way.
It turned out differently because my life is already full of joys, small ones and huge ones. It turned out differently because to do it that way – insisting one of these random things every day – would (for me) have made it one more project – and I have enough projects to occupy my headspace and my daytime.
It turns out that I do not need a joy project. What I need is a back-stop, a safety net, a ‘joy supplement’ to be taken when needed, not as a daily dose. So, after a few false starts, and forced motivations, I worked out my own approach. I decided that I would pull the random slip of potential joy and then wait for its right moment.
The slip reading 'stand barefoot on the earth' languished on the chiffonier in the hall for weeks. I moved it when I dusted. I re-anchored it with a beach pebble. It waited for a Wednesday in the middle of April. Then I went out, barefoot, into my garden. I had cut the back field, so I walked around that…avoiding the thistle stumps, feeling the damp of the earth, the surprising dry of the dead grass that had been sheltered by new growth, the crawl of insects.
I stood still.
I walked meditatively.
I call this a field, only because it cannot be properly called a lawn, but it is a small space. Small spaces can be sanctuaries just as much as expansive ones.
I felt the wind, smelt the earth, looked at the sky, heard the birds chirruping – no doubt asking what I was about and would that include replenishing the empty table?
I stood. And I stopped thinking.
There’s a paradox that I’m still trying to work out: how come mindfulness is really an emptying of the mind?
When I come back to myself, I find that I am thinking about my parents and what they would make of this space. It is not what either of them would have wanted to create, but I think my Dad would understand what I’m doing here, he would get the circling back to earlier times. He might even have words to teach me with. Mam would have wanted to tidy it up, pull out the weeds that are cherished wildflowers, straighten the ragged flagstones, remove the blackberry hedge. Even so, I think they would be pleased to see me happy here. A happiness that wasn’t their way of the world, but one they helped me towards, more than they knew. As did many others. Standing barefoot on the earth is a way of reaching down and reaching back and connecting with everything that is, but also everything that once was.
I could do this more often, even in this still cold, still wet, un-season. I could come out more frequently and earth myself and strengthen my connection to this place. I want to resolve to do so, but I look out the window of my back room to where the wisteria is only half-hearted about wanting to bloom, and the rain is again curtaining my view, and reluctance slinks in.
As the seasons become un-seasons, I know I need to re-earth myself: connect with the planet as she is now, on her own journey, rather than wishing to turn her back to where she was when I was young.
I need to remember to re-connect.
~ / ~
