I once wrote a poem about summer. I said that if summer was a person she would be the hot girl in high school who everyone has a crush on. Summer is making out on a warm night under an indigo sky. Summer is a fast car with the windows down. A time to go everywhere and do everything. To stay up too late and wake up too early. It’s a late afternoon nap after too much sun and sugar. Summer is a blast.
But spring is my real love. It’s the season of my birth; the fragrant season. In Vancouver spring smells like green wood and honey. In Los Angeles, it smells like jasmine. Spring is cheerful and energetic, but gently so. Nothing too crazy. Spring is everybody’s favorite kindergarten teacher, the one who knows how to tie dye a t-shirt, and can turn the classroom into a submarine. Spring makes an afternoon spent reading on a beanbag feel industrious and wholesome.
Mostly, spring is a time for new life and fresh starts.
I am a creature of habit and I love my routines — so much so that I feel antsy if I can’t get a handle on the shape of the day. Usually on a Sunday morning, I spend the first couple of hours writing this newsletter in bed. If I’m not writing, I go to the farmers’ market. And if I’m not at the farmers’ market, I go for a long hike. This morning I didn’t feel like doing any of those things. I woke up feeling sluggish, restless and aimless; too foggy-headed for writing, too lethargic for activity. I thought about the things I had planned to do today and just couldn’t decide where to start.
And then I realized that I was not really present in my body. I was mentally stuck in my to-do list and it was stressing me out. I believe that when the mind is pushing us toward activities that are not right for the moment, our physical and emotional body will tell us we’re off course through discomfort, lethargy, irritation, and restlessness. So I decided to let go of my preconceptions about how Sunday is supposed to go and allow this day to take an unexpected shape.
I noticed that something about this morning was different: the day was warm and bright, after a long, cold, wet winter. So I took my coffee and my journal outside. I closed my eyes and heard birdsong and bees. I let the warm-cool breeze turn my face toward the sun.
I sat and tuned in to my inner compass. Don’t rush, it said. Underneath the distractions of the mind, you know what you need, and you know how this day wants to be used.
What my day wanted was a few little easy housekeeping tasks. I hand-washed a silk shirt. I cleaned my makeup brushes. I tossed out some expired food from the back of the fridge.
My body wanted nourishment, but not my usual fruity breakfast. Instead I made a green smoothie that I’ve never made before with avocado, chickpeas, cucumber, spinach, herbs and spices. It was weird and delicious.
My body wanted movement, but not my usual intense weekend hike. So I found an online yoga class aptly named Fresh Start and moved through 45 minutes of gentle stretching and strengthening. I haven’t done yoga properly since undergoing four surgeries last year, and it felt so good to realize that it’s time to bring it back.
And only then was I ready to sit down and write.
The message of spring that wants to come through me today is this: What if restlessness is just a cue to slow down and tune into what your body really needs?
What if aimlessness just means that our day wants something different to be done with it, something outside of our preprogrammed options?
What if by breaking your everyday patterns and following your inner compass you can create space for a new idea to enter?
Even the most productive and pleasing routines get stale. Patterns form for a reason, and every pattern has its season. At some point a rhythm that once felt like flow starts to feel forced. We can’t know what to replace it with until we let go of our rote repetition and open ourselves up to the freshness of the moment, greeting the day with new eyes.
The dreaming of a new day
A long time ago, I had a dream. At least, I think it was a dream. It might have been a scene from a movie or a book. I turn to it when I am feeling dislocated from life, sifting through the memory bank to bring it to the surface where I can feel it again, and it never fails to whet my appetite for being in this world.
Although this memory or vision is fragmented and fleeting, hard to recall for more than a scrap of a moment, it is as sensorially sharp as the scene outside my window today.
In this dream, there is a young woman in an upstairs apartment in a white and blue wood-sided building on a tree-lined street on a steep hill above a bay. The woman might be me, or maybe just a character I projected myself into.
She is in a tiny kitchen and has just finished drying a dish, or eating a piece of fruit. A salt-scented breeze flows through her open window as she leans out to regard the world. Trees swaying. White light glinting. The scent of coffee brewing wafts in, and coconut suntan oil, and the distant sound of animated conversation and spoons clinking on saucers.
The breeze is soft, and she leans out a little further so that it can stroke her cheek. It will be warmer out than expected. You get the sense that if the spirit moves her, at any moment she might alight from this perch, catch an updraft, and launch herself into the green and yellow day.
xo
It's always a joy to read your blogs and I am also a Spring person, revelling in the spark of new life coming through after the winter chill. Interestingly, I believe all the family are writers/creative in some form or another. My Dad wrote a couple of books, one about his life and one a children's story which sadly never did get published and I still have the manuscript, typed on an old manual typewriter. One day I will get it converted into an electronic version to share around the family, but it's a big project. I have a number of journals and writings but I've never managed to be able to make them public, which I so admire in you.
I'm sitting at my PC with the sun streaming through the window, it's not quite warm enough to sit outside yet as there's still a sharpness in the breeze here in the UK.
Loved this Mags. Your writing is so amazing.