A Crocus in the Morning

Water colors dancing throughout endless space of frontier, petals floating though the sky landing at my bare feet soiled a bit and standing, resting on young grass as green as the day you were born. It is the first day of spring. I have felt tired, washed up for several days, but I feel peace in my heart. This is always the most challenging time of year for me, when life pushes out the sleepy stems with such force, and the daffodils and forsythia burst forth with their transformative illuminating yellow blossoms. My birthday a week away, and sun and warm days barely here and on the horizon like a dawning day, a new year; a birth from the ashes and slumber of a long cold, restless and catatonic winter.

I have done well this year, practicing self-awareness, self-care on a renewed level, and the writing has helped. I have spent my evenings at home, resting early and showering myself with the love and attention of my sweet animal children. I've been reading, listening to peaceful music and watching Murder She Wrote episodes from the mid-eighties. I am not sure why I got so exhausted but I believe it was from too much exercise and lactic acid which I am sensitive to, and activities that have drawn from my spirit; intense conversations, a funeral, and my parents returning from two and a half months in India and Sri Lanka.

Yet here I am, awake, alert, happy and embracing the birthing of the new beginning of springtime. In past years this time has become a blur and I have spent my time coping and suffering with reality and moods, unable to enter the meditative space that is needed to encounter and embrace the pushing forth of life that can be so intense. Although this year it just feels like a gentle and slow awakening; every day a few more flowers and a little more green. Yoga may be helping me to center in my body and giving me the skill to breathe and slow down. Perhaps age and the wisdom of years that have passed and experiences felt, has allowed me to look at this time of year as an opportunity for cleansing, new habits, and the slow and clear observation of what the world undergoes in its natural transitions from one extreme to the next. I can learn from her; how to have seasonal shifts instead of intense swings. I have come far with this and experience exhaustion and physical forms of anxiety more than intense mood swings. But nature is gradual, ever surprising us with a new bud or birth from the soil here and there, not all at once like the landslide that I felt.

Clear wisps of sunlight enter the room on a breeze cool and gentle, spinning itself from the edge of a cloud white and full of life bearing moisture coupled with the sun’s rays. Critters are born, frogs sing, flowers bud and bloom, and people step outside to dig in the soil or sit in the dried and newly carpeted lawn of lush fertile and nourishing grass. We begin to come together with this new awakening, as we all wake up a bit inside of our spirits and bodies, welcoming the sun and earth into the next phase of its cycle- one illuminate, full of dances, moving, as well as resting; but in a world alive and awake bustling with new life, fresh ideas, and creative energy that bursts from our hearts like the crocus on the morning of the final snow.