"It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Yesterday was bright, sunny, comparatively warm. Today it is raining, the wind blows hard enough to make both the trees and bird feeders dance, and it is comparatively chilly. The weather whips back and forth like reeds on the edge of wetland, blown by spring winds. Sugar weather. Our streams runs freely during the day but at dusk forms frazil, the ice crystals of turbulent weather. Such is spring at Fat Hummingbird Farm. Spring is fickle and teasing, exasperating and inspiriting. And we are thrilled! We have not seen spring, a true spring, in thirty-five years. Since we left the prairies. For that time we lived on the West Coast and though spring may be noted by the pink of the cherry blossom trees, spring is rainfully like every other season there. So, despite its contrariness and polarity, we embrace spring like the long-lost friend that it is.
It was the Spring Equinox a couple of days ago. Days now can grow longer by as much as six minutes at a time, pulling dusk and dawn closer together over a shortening night. In that shortened night sits a full moon, the Worm Moon. The smell in the air is less of snow and more of rain. The petichor - the distinct scent of rain. Or to be more precise, the scent of an oil that's released from the earth into the air before rain begins to fall. The daylight is shifting.
I am waiting impatiently for the forsythia to bloom - yellow stars and curls on bare grey branches. In the still-sleeping garden beds, waiting for the fork that turns their chilled soils up to the steaming sun, we've noticed the first Robin of the year. He hopped and waddled in search of the first spring earthworms, his chortling call a bright note in the air. The crows are starting to scavenge under the trees in hopes of material for their nests. They drag winter-fallen branches in their beaks, falling over them as they go. They underestimate the weight of those branches. Though from what I have seen of the crow nests exposed in the fall, messy and inarticulate, most have managed to get those unwieldy branches up and poked into the nests successfully.
The mornings, that have been dark and still all winter, are now cacophonous with birdsong - singing up the early sun. The birds are here in greater numbers now, and in the near midnight time I sometimes hear agains the giggles and yips of coyotes. I don't realize that I've missed them until they are here again and I wonder how I went a whole winter without hearing them.
Although it will be awhile yet before the land about us turns green again and the warmth can be trusted not to disappear in a wild wind, Mother Earth is loosening winter's grip. Distending buds and embryos. Shortening the midday shadows.
Everything is careening towards growth. We humans keep fires during the winter, striving to keep cold and dark at bay. But now there seems to be a fire within the landscape itself - flowing through the trees, shattering the clouds and lighting them from within. It gives voice to new spring peepers, pulls the turtles from the chilled mud, and brings the wild down from the mountain. Already we have seen porcupines and skunks and coyotes. And there was a bear in one neighbour's field and there has been a herd of deer in another neighbour's pasture. The chirping and whistles and songs of birds is like an orchestra loudly tuning up as they croon for mates. It is the time of Gokotta - a Swedish term that means to wake up in the early morning with the express purpose of going outside to hear the first birds of spring sing.
In the same way that frozen branches of trees start to thaw in the warmth, producing sap in their lymph, my muscles and tendons long to unfold from winter's cramp. I want to stride and stretch - rather than inch over ice or slog through snow. We develop over the course of winter that same torpor seen in winter rivers and roots in our blood and our bellies, our muscles and bones. We too are frozen. I want, fervently, to walk our land. Time to find again the liminal places at Fat Hummingbird Farm. Like the one at the edge of our woods where open grass becomes shadowed and deep places. And where there is a sighing silence. Or the rocky outcrop in the middle of the field where unique plants escape the plow or the munching of cows. Or the liminal place I know exists by the edge of the stream, under the willows, where the mosses and grasses and reeds will come alive again - the moistness and relative warmth producing sheets of frog spawn. The transition place between water and land that is nothing if not fervent, fetid, and feral. A liminal place.
Spring is such a strong season. The spring winds and waters are full of elation and riot. Spring breathes into us. It breathes into us a rhythm, a deep desire, which all animals and plants understand. We all rise to an ascending sun.
Spring at Fat Hummingbird Farm . . . . . I am put in mind of the Irish word - Tenalach. It means the relationship one has with land/air/water, a deep connection that allows one to literally hear the earth sing. That song lightens our step so we can match the pace set by the Vernal Equinox. A joyful pace.
