Spirits in Spring
This week’s prompt from Trace:
I want you to write about spirits, and how they handle the changing of seasons and temperature in spring. This can include lots of spirits, especially local ones of the earth and plants and waters, weather and sky, but it certainly doesn’t need to just be about natural ones. If you have feelings for city spirits and how they handle the season, that would be good to include as well. It’s a time of change, and I’m sure many have very strong opinions about and reactions to that.
It’s a tall order to talk for all spirits, but I’ll see what I can do. This is one where what I feel drawn to responding to first is my own reaction; I’m a spirit too and there’s something in this that is a spirit reacting to other spirits’ reactions.
I struggle with spring. I struggle with change in general, and spring in this bioregion feels like an unsettled time. Might be summery warm one day, and dreary rainy the next. This past weekend I took a walk to the library that started as “Ah lovely, short-sleeve weather” on the way, and “Oh no why didn’t I bring a coat” on the way back an hour later.
Some of this change is good, of course. This is the season when I get a lot of energy back, a relief from the extra weight of winter, but having that energy back while still contending with random might-as-well-be-winter days isn’t terribly fun.
So maybe that’s a sense I have of the local spirits of sky and cloud and water: They don’t know what to do in Spring. It’s a confusing time for them, with sea warmth shifting, and jet-streams fluctuating, and convergence zones converging. When I think about it as them just doing their thing and doing their best, it makes it a little easier maybe to weather the weather.
Turning then to the land under that weather… Like I said in the last one of these, I think of the land itself as the body of those spirits, and of course there the aspects of spring are clear. It’s work, at least in the sense of activity. Growing, blooming, making pollen, raising young ones. What’s joyous and fertile on the surface ultimately hides, I think, a degree of uncertainty, somewhat in responding to that changing weather, and somewhat just preparing for the other less-vibrant seasons to come. Every season is uncertain, of course, but the flavor of Spring’s uncertainty is the chaos of something growing wild, in all the good and bad ways that implies.
And then I think about the spirits of craft; the houses and streets and city. Try as I might I don’t get a sense of spring from the built city. I should note that I think it’s a mistake to think of “city spirits” just in terms of concrete and metal and glass, of course. Maybe that’s because I’m blessed to live in a city with lots of greenery. Certainly the green-things in the city are busy in spring. But to the built environment, it somehow feels less significant. Summer and Winter have their clear themes, but Spring feels… unsettled. A between-time. Constructed things take a back seat while wild things have their moment.
Writing all that out, I find that those three help put my reactions in a lot of good perspective too. Compassion for the changes that stress me out. Appreciation for the complexities of wildness. Acceptance that all that change doesn’t have to be for me, it can just be around me. Maybe that’ll help in this season and ones to come.