Weekend journaling prompt

Welcoming the Spring Equinox

On Saturday 5 April I’ll be part of Canterbury Festival’s Step Into Spring with Will Skidelsky - tickets and more information here • Take out or renew an annual subscription in March, and you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win my lovely box of goodies - more details here

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Earlier this week - in the icy cold - I went outside and surveyed my garden. This sounds grander than it is: I have two flower beds and a planter platform above my bins, with which I’m obsessed because it’s eye-level and I see it every time I leave the house. Honestly, this is about as much as I can manage, and even then it routinely gets choked with weeds because I am negligent of all things except my writing.

It was dawn, just after six, and I was in my dressing gown and slippers. The dog followed me around somewhat resentfully, as I was interrupting her usual morning patrol for squirrels. A few days before, Bert had come home from school complaining that he’d been snowed on while queuing up for his lunch. Winter still felt very present here this morning, despite the peachy light. A lot of soil was bare, the tender plants having all died back. It all felt a little barren.

But the climbing rose, which I planted last year and had rambled all over the fence by the end of the season, had little clusters of leaf all over its briar. I could see how it was readying to explode very soon, when the sun got a little higher and warmer. My greengage tree was covered in plump buds, its foliage ready to break out. No blossom this year, but such is life with a greengage. It only crops every seven years or so, and that is what I signed up for when I planted a heritage tree. I buy my greengages at the farmers’ market.

As I shuffled around, noticing the opening flowers on the clematis, the first stalks of cerinthe shivering in the dawn cold, I was overtaken by a sense of immanence, of promise. Here was something new and energetic, just waiting to happen. In that moment, it struck me that this can turn - or actually, that this will turn. The last six months have made me feel like an intruder in my own world, an errant mouse or a spider trapped under a bowl. It’s been dark in there, constrained, terrifying. I have not been able to orient myself.

But now, the bowl is being lifted, and I find myself blinking into the light again. I can make a run for freedom, or I can stay in the darkness, which has come to feel like home. But it it not home, or not a good one. It is the kind of home in which all the tender things die back, and only the hard wood remains. It is the kind of home in which buds hold themselves tightly, rather than erupting into life.

The Spring Equinox fell on Thursday this week. The year is turning again. It always is. It will do that with or without our help. Our work is to match its pace.

A bumper journaling prompt - or maybe more of a ritual - this week, including a recorded meditation. It’s all about working with the equinox to see if we can feel a shift in our energy, after a long, long winter.