In the Season of Uncertainty
Facing the world and the weather on the spring equinox
My journal right now is full of notes about signs of the forthcoming springtime. How on the first day of March I heard the frogs newly sounding from a neighbor’s pond on my way home. The first crocuses that caught my eye. The first afternoon I saw turkey vultures once again circling above the flat part of the valley where it curves north and west.
These notes suggest that I’m heading into this year with a greater attunement to the local seasonal cycles than before, though it’s still only my second full spring in the Rogue Valley. We continue to become better acquainted, me and this place. This year, I know some small patches to watch as all the early season foraging greens begin to flush out along the walking path by the creek.
Still, I’ve felt uneasy at the approach of the spring equinox. Unlike the other sun-centered days on the calendar, I haven’t found my way into a set ritual or routine for this one.
On summer solstice, I strive to bask in the full glory of the sun at its most potent. I aim to be outside the whole day if I can, preferably in the backcountry (and more and more frequently, taking part in the paired observation of Hike Naked Day).
The winter solstice is a mirrored practice, in which I take time to dwell in the dark, and honor the work that can be done in our lives when light is absent.
For the fall equinox, I travel to the coast when possible, and at sunset stand on the dividing edge between land and sea, soaking in that moment of perfect balance of sunlit hours before the days begin to dwindle.
You’d think in spring it would feel natural to do something similar. But spring hardly feels balanced. Spring, if anything, is a mess. It is the season of false starts and dashed hopes, as flashes of warmth lead to canceled picnics when the storm clouds come circling back around.
My birthday is a mere few days after the spring equinox and as a child I would pray or wish for weather balmy enough to allow for a camping trip, which unsurprisingly never happened. For my 16th—a year the warm weather seemed to be holding—I was close (I like to believe) to persuading my parents that I ought to be allowed to try such a venture solo with some friends over our spring break. They were spared any conflict over the matter when I came down with strep and was left to languor inside all week.
That, to me, is the experience of spring: one of uncertain and frequently failed plans. At its best, it’s been a period of muddy transitions. On my birthday in particular I’ve often found myself traveling, half asleep on a Greyhound or curled up next to my backpack in some corner of an airport. It’s the place of in-betweens, the next adventure or enterprise poking its head around the corner yet not fully revealed, as outside the window, winter claws its way into continued existence.
Birds migrate home in spring, but this habit of travel means I’ve too often found myself migrating away. So I’ve been in search of a practice that feels grounding, in this indecisive season, and that keeps me rooted rather than encouraging escape.
Unintentionally once more this year, I’ll be traveling again the day of my birthday, which has drawn my focus all the more to the equinox, when I’ll still be home. How might I be present in this place, where I’m trying not just to live or to reside but to genuinely inhabit, to dwell, during this tempestuous time?
This year, as with the December solstice, I’ve decided the darkness—or rather, the damp, and the wind, and the mud—are the point. My intent this spring equinox is to walk a portion of the local watershed and see how it has fared through the winter. To be outside, where I am, weather be damned. (There was soft hail this morning and reports of flooding—anything could be possible by Thursday.) I’ll go look at the water roiling down the hillside and contemplate the fact that coming back into balance is not always a graceful, gentle act, but sometimes one in which we must jump into the muck to find the starts of new life trying to make their way to us.
I admit to hoping that if I can make myself hardy enough to be whipped in the face by unexpected spring gusts, I will tap into the strength needed for the braver forms of action necessary in these times. For we are being tossed about by winds and currents harsher than what I will meet outside my door this week.
This is the point of all these seasonal practices, really: to ground us in the places we love, to know them as worth protecting, while also remembering the more-than-human powers upon which we depend, if most days unconsciously so. It is this whole other realm both beyond and encompassing the human one that makes life possible, and that, I believe, sometimes act through us in ways we still do not fully fathom. It is times such as the ones we face now in which it is wise to go and seek their aid.
In the season of uncertainty, who knows what will happen on the hike I have planned the day of the equinox. Whatever comes to pass, it will, surely, serve as a reminder that even the most beautiful forms of change do not always arise from a neatly made plan, but unfold instead through a storming forth of internal and unpredictable forces.
Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg
Some previous seasonal observances: