Becoming Spring

Winter and spring have been playing a game of musical chairs lately. Some days winter seems to win. All that pent-up energy, unreleased during the past few months, keeps erupting in mushy clumps. They swirl toward the ground in slow motion as if trying to postpone their inevitable demise. But their fight against gravity is futile – eventually they make a landing and revert to a liquid state, immediately absorbed into the ground, thirsty for every bit of moisture needed to feed future growth.

Then there are days when long threads of rain stitch the earth and the sky together, ever closer, until the clouds spread across the ground and press their ears against its surface listening to life seething underneath, ready to break out.

This in-between season is an invitation to look closer. And once I do, I start noticing ephemerals pushing their way through last year’s leaves, those brave harbingers of spring, so deceptive in their fragility – hardiness and determination masked by a dainty bow of a head, a seductive curve of a leaf. Under my feet, roots are sucking sustenance from the depths of the earth and sending it up all the way to the tips of pointy branches. I throw my arms around a tree trunk and can almost feel juices pulsating under the bark, in sync with my own heartbeat. Up above, tree branches twist and sway under the wind’s spell. They prod ragged clouds, their gray fabric fraying at the edges until the sun breaks through and dissects cool air in one precise motion.   

Spring laughs softly and continues to steadily advance across the land, her moves betrayed by an exultant bird song and a trail of colourful puddles left by her dripping paint brush.

I embrace this uncertainty of the in-between, a reminder that a boundary between seasons – whether in nature or in life – is porous: not so much of a straight, clear line but rather a wave that advances and retreats at irregular intervals. That I can’t step out of winter and into spring as I would from one room into another. That just like the earth on the verge of spring, I too am constantly in a state of becoming…