It’s hard to believe that a week ago we were under inches of snow and temperatures were below zero. Today the white blanket isn’t snowflakes but snow drops, and it’s embroidered in the purple, yellow and other white of crocus flowers.
I remind myself that it is still February – and that snowdrops are the February maids, they herald not Spring only the promise of Spring. They flower and then if snow should fall they hunker down and come back stronger drinking snow-melt as some kind of floral aphrodisiac, as if such nun-like flowers would have heard of such a thing. The snow vanishes and they simply stand up, shoulders back and hang their head demurely, belying the strength and resilience of this most gentle of our spring flowers. I walked among them and was grateful.
I remind myself that it is still February – and not just the snowdrops are alive and smiling. Crocus stars opening to the sky. I tread softly and kneel gentle among them but still come away with saffron stains upon my shins, where I had crouched to look more closely. Primrose also venture out, timidly, in ones and twos.
February is too early for Spring, I remind myself, even as I pull off socks, and pull on shorts and sit to write in the garden.
Too early for that first butterfly that skipped across my woodland path.
Then, who am I to say ‘too early’? Am I to say “no, you are come to soon” and wish it so away? Rather say “Welcome, and thank you” and trust that Gaia knows how much we need an early Spring and a long warm Summer – how much we long to be back outside where there are sights and sounds of other lives.
Grateful, then, to throw open windows and doors and let the fresh air through.
To eat potato chips and drink cider and call it lunch.
To listen to distant conversation, a passing motorbike…to imagine this a pub garden (I remember them) and bethink my cemetery stroll a hike in the hills.
To close my eyes, lift my face to the sun, and listen. The robin sings in answer to a corvid cawing. Some-one working beyond the fence, the intermittent thrssshhh-huh of hand wood-sawing. Slow traffic on the Bowthorpe Road. An unseen plane high overhead. Sounds that once would have been intrusive to the peace, now accentuate it.
As much as the silence of last year’s solitary Spring may have been restorative, it was also eerie, unnatural to the humans we’ve become. I sometimes think of it as a talisman, a touchstone – a place we might return – but not so sudden harshly – not with so much human cost.
How would it be, I wonder, if we could agree to have a solitary Spring – or Summer – Autumn – Winter – not always, and not thrust upon us. Say, once ever four years – like the Olympics or the World Cup – an Earth Cup year – when we would choose to pay homage to Gaia by having a quiet season, not a ‘lock-down’, but a ‘close-down’, a drawing close, a retreat – a conscious chosen solitary season. We could start with a Spring – then four years later, Summer – another four before Autumn close – and finally, four years more before a withdrawn Winter. A 16-year cycle of allowing three months of the year to lie truly fallow. Three months of slowness, of stillness, rest and recuperation for the people and the planet.
Such a thing may be indeed a wild flight of fancy…but as the man sang: Imagine.
We have proof of concept. When forced, we can bring our economic activity, our personal relationships, our habits, hobbies and rituals, to heel, we can call them all instantly to a halt. Put them on hold. All our pseudo-tribal allegiances vanish and we cleave to closer community. We know we can do this, because we did.
Imagine now if we learn and evolve so that we can do it happily, voluntarily, regularly. One season only, once every four years.
Unlike the pandemic response, it wouldn’t be open-ended. It need not cost lives or livelihoods. It could be costed into the system. Close the tax-law loopholes and build community funds for those whose lives are so precarious they cannot lay-by enough for the laying in period. Tithe as used to be the way.
We have proof that we can do this. Because we have, somehow, done it with no planning and with incompetence governance. How much easier it could be with planning and forethought and agreement that yes, we did listen, we did learn, and short-term closures, retreats, slowness are good things – so let us do them now, and in the future. Let us not wait until the planet loses patience with its children. Let’s grow up and make a new plan.
Ah, yes. I dream. But this, you see is what Spring does. She makes me forget that a week ago I was shivering and soggy in snow. She puts forth her shoots and flowers and her early year perfume of hinted green – and says “Come now, this sunny Sunday afternoon…come into the garden…and dream!”
