A few thoughts on Spring as a time of budding, new growth, and birth
March feels like birth/rebirth to me.
Even though Feb 1/2, known on the Celtic Wheel of the Year as Imbolc (which means, literally, Ewe's Milk) is known to be the time of year when sheep are birthing the Spring lambs, to me this time has always been March.
Even when Easter (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox) isn't until late April.
And with the feeling of birth/rebirth, being born/reborn, giving birth/rebirthing comes fresh energy. A feeling of the energy of the entire world rising up through me even though I know that half of the actual world is subsiding, moving into autumn, it FEELS this way, this rising up. The fruit trees are budding, the Canada geese are nesting, the dogs and cats are blowing their winter hair in clouds and drifts, and I feel like I’m waking up finally after a long Rip Van Winkle winter.
This is the time of year when creation begins. When humanity, collectively, begins to feel the potentials available to us for the coming months. Like the trees outside, our sap is coming up, flooding us with juiciness, pressing itself into our energetic limbs as we explode into bud.
It is fecund time, a time when lovers meet and connect, when falling into bed is easy and exciting. Gosh, do your remember being 16 and having a crush?
I do. I dreamt last night of a man I had a crush on when I was 16 and he was 18. We spent 2 evenings together and I don't believe we ever even kissed. He had beautiful, dark brown eyes and something, whatever that thing is, that felt like a hook in my belly pulling me toward him.
The night we met we sat together and talked for hours. And hours. So close our breaths mingled but not so close our lips brushed. He asked me on a date and I said yes.
The next night he picked me up on his motorcycle and we went out. Somewhere. I don't remember where, only that he drove and my arms were around his taught belly and the wind was in my face.
Gosh. And then we stopped and we talked more. It could have become love, I think.
That feels like Spring to me, which isn't even here yet. That feeling of purity and innocence and potential, even when you're full grown, older, a little jaded and know things now that you didn't when you were 16. Like that after the date you told your best friend and she told you that he was married. Like that he is dead now, hit by a truck a few years ago in a shocking cutting away of life. He had a wife and children who were left bereft. A different wife, by the way. But those are late autumn things, Spring is for the rising.
I wonder what is rising up in you right now? What is waiting to be brought forth into the world?
For me it is this website and blog, as well as rebuilding my Red Tent, women’s circle village from the ashes of the pre-pandemic, homeschool community that I’m no longer part of, old one. I'm hoping some of the Red Tent ladies will come—my homeschool mom friends who I’ve stayed in touch with even though I’ve been finished with that part of my life for several years now, kids grown and in college or married— and that some young women will come, that we can create that space where the need for a village can be met, where generational wisdom can be shared.
Something for my community, something for me, and some work that I love and am exceptional at.
But tell me about you. What's rising, what you are exploding into bud with as Spring arrives.
