hibernation

This year I am just not ready for spring.


These last few days the city has basked in unexpected sunshine. The light has that particular suffusion that can only be seen on a bright morning that is still chill, still pale but awash with more tone and vibrance than winter’s monochrome shades. There has been a sudden surge in growth from plants and trees. Every time I look out a window or walk past a patch of greenery, there is just more greenery to look at. Diancecht has given Airmid’s cloak a vigorous shaking and suddenly there is foliage strewn everywhere: buds and leaves and even flowers and blossoms reaching for the sky or turning their faces to the sun. Everything speaks of the surge of springtime energies, the sap rising, the sprout well budded out.


But it is too fast for me. Ostara has trampled in and thrown the curtains wide and the windows open while I’m still half drugged from winter’s deep hibernation and cannot spring so blithely from my slumber. So much of my intent and attention has been turned inward, on processes of the mind and things academical. On the deep delving into books and papers, on pouring and stirring words and ideas into a giant black cauldron, of engaging with complexity and of trying to find questions. Stir, stir, stir. Never mind answers, answers seem a blessing too much to ask for. Just searching for the right questions and hoping that alchemy will somehow do the rest. Alphabet soup, word stew. I have a dusty memory that the word ‘stew’ means ‘enclose’, put it in a pot, close it up and let time do the rest. All lead me back to the womb and the cave and feeling the need for confinement.


Or is it avoidance? I feel cautious of the glare of the sun. I am cold. I still carry winter’s aches in my bones. I want to stay inside and not connect, avoid the dizzying rise of energy and distraction. Maybe this is what happens when you do not make that deliberate spiritual connection to the turning of the year. All of this because I’ve been too busy to mark the Vernal Equinox and the passage into spring? Too busy, too busy, so much to do, so little time. Has my spirit overslept? After all these years and all these rituals, have I simply neglected to set my alarm clock and found myself stuck in the dark half of the year?