The change of seasons is a time when nature leads us through transition.  She wakes us up and reminds us of the passage of time, puts us in a temporary state of confusion, excitement, loss, and/or expectation.

Each of us harbor inner associations and memories of each season, implicitly and explicitly.  We may love the opening scent of a lilac, suffer the fogginess of allergies, feel renewed at the site of the first sturdy daffodil, or awaken to a new memory from a springtime of our youth.

Winter to Spring can be a particularly evocative time as new life emerges out of the frozen forgotten ground, like Lazarous rising from the dead.  The boney webs of branches bloom: white to pink.  The bulbs have pushed green sprouts up through the soil that give way to scented waxy petals.  Every year…every year.  And we change our costume to attend to the new warmth; continuing our routine while an ancient instinct deep within us is responding to our natural environment.  How will we respond to the call of our inner wild nature that knows now is a time of change and emergence?  We are crossing a threshold where something new is being asked of us.  We are shifting from a wintry internal sense of being to more exterior presence and expectation.

The ask is not to turn away but to turn towards the calling of Spring.  Is the call to extend your internal winter, to slowly awaken like the leaves that follow the blossoms on the trees?  Is it, like the daffodil, to come through in full radiance at the earliest sign of Spring?  Maybe it is to invest more fully in something that has laid dormant, to push up through the soil like the lilacs.  Whatever it is, notice it!  Open your inner ear to your own instinctual response during the transition from Winter to Spring.

Instructions for Life

Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it
-Mary Oliver