It has become one of the key days in my year – the first day in spring when I take my journal outside to do my Morning Pages. It is the first day that is warm enough and bright enough for me to want to bare my skin to the sun and to make a proper start on the garden.
I unearth the plastic mats to cover the bare concrete of the stoop, wipe the winter grime from the table, spread cushions on the metal chairs. I make coffee, gather up sunglasses and pens and my journal. I strip down to swimsuit and shorts – though it is probably not quite warm enough for sunbathing – and notice that the weight gained over winter really does show. It is not a pretty sight. Neither of those things matter. This is the real start of spring.
It is the first day in the year where my day starts in nature. Half-tamed nature in places perhaps. At this stage of the seasons, probably not even half-tamed. The back grass hasn’t been cut since last year’s drought and is more dead nettle than grass. This seems to be the case all around at the moment, no doubt a result of the very wet winter. I need to harvest before I strim. I wonder what it is good for. I'm sure it's edible, and probably medicinal.
The garden is feeling its way, as I am. We had a long dry summer. A winter that was a mostly just damp, until a severe frost hit that lasted for days and killed off more than just my central heating. Then the last few weeks have just been wet and wet and wet. And we kept reminding ourselves of summer when we begged for this.
The grape hyacinth have taken to their new patches with equal vigour. The fruit trees are testing out their first buds. The pear is coming into flower. The peach and apple are still uncertain. The fuchsia looks not to have survived the frost and needs to be taken down. I won’t dig it out. It may come back. The lobelia bush is getting to straggly, so it too will get some hard pruning. I’m hoping the wisteria has survived. The herb beds need weeding and replanting. I think the garlic and the chives might be all that came through the winter undamaged.
Everywhere there is neglect that needs to be addressed. There is a lot of work to be done.
Today is the day to make a start. A small start.
Experience tells me, though, that mostly what I will do today is make a list, and maybe – just maybe – make a start on the first thing on it. Pick a corner and start there.
Mostly what I will do today is re-acquaint my bare feet with the grass, in the early morning dew, and then later when the sun has warmed the earth beneath. I will take time to notice the warmth of the sun and the cool of the breeze on my skin.
Mostly what I will do is start once again to pay more attention to the life that I share my space with. The robin that waited for the pigeons to squabble away over the rooftops before hopping onto the table. A bluebottle that alights briefly on the concrete wall. A sleek crow that surveys all from the neighbour's roof ridge before dropping down the fence, then up onto the seed arch, to hesitantly figure out his way onto the bird table. He does not land with the crash bravado of the pigeons, but cocks his head from side to side, wondering how to get there: you clearly cannot come in from above, you have to duck under what remains of the ‘roof’. To be fair that part of thestructure is falling apart and possibly is now an actual hazard. Removal of it needs to go on the list.
I can hear a blackbird, and a flock of gulls. Later I will see the first of the year's bees and butterflies, still skittish and too chill to land for their close-ups.
Mostly today I will wool-gather and write. The wool-gathering is necessary. With the approaching five-year anniversary, I have been trying to reflect on that – the event and the period between then and now. I have started and stalled, several times. I feel that there should be an acknowledgement of the anniversary and everything since, but I find I have nothing to say.
I read my journal from that week. I clearly knew what was coming and I’m shocked at some of what is there on the page. It seems cold, but I was already planning “afterwards”. I could see the black cloud on the horizon and the only uncertain thing was how quickly it would arrive. Even that, I had an idea about. I had looked it up. I knew it would be quick and brutal. It was.
There is no anger in those pages: only the hope that it would not be too painful for him. It was.
He spoke about mental torture. He raged.
I did not. I simply did what I could and wrote about what I might need to do next. I wrote a lot about faith, even though I did not know what in.
In retrospect the mess he left behind was a gift. The length of time it took to clear was time in which to work through the deepest of the hurt. I remember all of it. I remember details. But now, I do so with a certain amount of disconnect most of the time, as though it happened in another lifetime.
The truth, then, is not that I have no more to say about that week, or all the changes since – but that I have no desire to do so. I do not wish to keep revisiting it.
I listened to Molly McCord talking about the April energies being strong on new beginnings...and the endings, closures and completions required to enable them. Her invitation was to look at what, energetically, we are holding on to, that is karmically complete.
What is it that I am holding on to, that I must let go in order to fully embrace whatever it is that I want now?
Five is my magic number. So the "five years" thing has become “a thing” in my head. Only in my head. It isn’t really any more meaningful than any other come-around of this time of year. It was at this time of year that I lost each of my parents as well. April. I’m not a big fan of April.
But then…the sunshine, and the garden, and the little blue flowers all seek to change my mind. And they are winning.
I realise that I have been holding on to “transformation” without recognising that the true nature of transformation is that it has an end point. I have been holding on to ‘all the change’ that started with handing in my notice at work and took me through bereavement and grief and a mad ill-conceived, thankfully short-lived, love-affair and clearances and renovations and a house move and giving up my freelance work and menopause and finding new friends and losing old ones and
redefining myself, shifting direction – not necessarily in that order – and culminated in the enforced stillness of the lock-down years. I have been holding on to the drama of it. The achievement of coming through it.
I have been polishing the notional “badge of honour” for having come through it the way I did. But that badge is tarnishing anyway. It was cheap to start with and now it is old. It needs to be put away in the back of a drawer that is rarely opened. Not thrown away and forgotten – because there may be other challenges up ahead when I will need to remind myself that ‘yes, here is this evidence, I can do this, I will always be ok’ - but put out of sight and let be.
For now the transformation is complete. The drama is done. Change and growth continue, but the seismic shift has silenced itself. I am no longer in flux. I am settling into whatever this is, now.
There has been a recent resurgence of my innate insecurity, but I'm learning that has nothing to do with externalities – it is all to do with self-identity.
If I let go of all that was – fully, finally, just let it lie – what then? Who am I, now?
It starts to dawn on me that the reason for my sense of insecurity rests entirely on my inability to answer that question. Society demands that we define ourselves by our roles or our job descriptions. But what if I am not a wife, or a mother, or a witch? What if I don’t have a ‘job’ that bestows a title upon me? How do I answer the question: who are you, what do you do?
As I sit in my garden on this Spring morning pondering all of this, a six-spot ladybird lands on the cushion where I have my feet propped up. A tiny, beautiful, insect. There she stays for minute after minute after minute. She investigates the stripes, green, lemon, white. She appears to graze on whatever minute foodstuff she might find, or perhaps she is merely scenting it out, wondering if it is a place she might want to return to. Perhaps her turning this way and that is merely to ensure her carapace catches equal sun on all sides. Perhaps she too is just basking in this first warm day of spring – and perhaps she is wiser than me, and asks no questions at all.
