I wait and hold still, my restlessness bottled inside of me. I want to let it go, release it into something productive, into a flow of creativity, into my disintegrating routines, but I cannot. I sit at my desk and my legs jitter up and down, my brain flitter from one thought to the next. I muster bouts of focus on the simple task of recording my daily observations. I’ve been doing this for over two years now and yet, the last few weeks have been a struggle.
I recognise this problem. It happened last year too as winter faded into spring. I was not restless then but exhausted. Exhausted all the time. I launched into spring at full speed and forgot that awakening from the slumber of winter is a delicate process. I also now know that I was likely already suffering from iron deficiency.
I leave the desk to stand by the window instead and watch the garden sway in the wind. I wonder if this restlessness is in part borne out of all this wind and rain. All this wind and rain. It poured and blew for what feels like most of winter, my world water and ripples. But now is the time for spring, for buds, new life, sunshine. I have emerged out of my head, the hushed cocoon of winter broken weeks ago but the weather does not let me out. Of course I can still step into the wind and rain but I am ready for the sun, for the air to thicken with pollen and haze. I want to dig my hands in the garden and watch spiders scramble away from me.
Spring is a fickle time. It comes along early, fools me out of my body. It pulls at my tendrils, seeks to uproot me too fast, and I give in. I always give in. A plastic wrapper flies over the fence and settles below the flowering forthysia. I make a note to pick it up later. I push the window out, open it wider to let the air in and take a deep breath. This too is a process. I need to open myself to this unravelling, this unsettling I struggle to understand and explain. I do not need to understand and explain. I am of the world, of the seasons of my corner of Earth. I cannot expect to pass from winter into spring unscathed.
‘Winter into spring…’ I whisper to myself as an incantation.
I have no idea what it means only that it affects me. I wonder if my unannounced grand plan of creativity I set at the start of the year was not misguided. Shouldn’t now be the start of the year? We talk of spring as a birth, a renewal, a time of flowering and nascent things. Yet, we choose to celebrate the turn of the year in the dead of winter when most still sleep, when I still sleep. I open my eyes to the bedraggled tulips, petals in disarray from the ceaseless wind.
I blow out with the rush of air that batters the unmoveable brick house in which I live. The garden fence does not budge but the grass pulsate in a now familiar rhythm. Can I too let myself pulsate to the rhythm of the wind? Can I relent the grip on my routines and let them ebb and flow? I am afraid to. My routines anchor me into place, soothe the jagged edges of a life that feels out of step. The plastic wrapper shivers and threatens to continue its flight through the neighbourhood. I rush downstairs, hastily slide into a waning pair of shoes and step onto the paving slabs. I stumble. My heels crush the fabric of the shoes. I find my balance. I stand and give my body to the wind. I undulate with the grass, liquify with the puddles of mud on the saturated clay. I wait.
The crinkle of plastic wakes me. I run to grab it before it goes somewhere else, the back of my shoes bounces against my bare heels. I bend to the ground, spread my free hand on the mud, sense the grit of little stones and clumps of earth. Buds of decorative grass I do not want are rising fast, unnoticed by so long spent standing instead of kneeling. I leave them be for now and turn my attention to the rampant strawberries. The flowers have not yet emerged but the tangle network of stems and leaves has spread further than I remembered. I pull a weed out of the pot that is home to the baby oak and I chuckle to myself at the sight of so small a tree. It's no more than a twig yet it's also an oak. Big, majestic, leafy, crinkled bark, and large swatches of shade below its canopy. But not yet. Not yet. I will never see them large but I will see them planted in the ground, maybe even rise to be a gangly teenager. I trail my free hand along the bark and feel for the protuberance of buds. Small, they too wait. I close my hand around the oak, let my warmth leech away. Water seeps through my jeans, from my knees to my legs, and I let go.
I stumble back into the lawn, lay my body down onto wet grass, hand still holding the plastic sheet. Eyes open I am blinded by rain, ruffled by wind. I hold still. Change will come and I too will turn with the Earth.