Dear Friends

Isn’t it lovely when the air doesn’t just take the opportunity to bite one in the face on an early morning jaunt?  The only good outcome of the biting cold on sleepy, warm flesh is the ‘healthy glowing’ look that might arise. Other than that I am very happy to be gradually saying goodbye to the bitter cold.

Spring is encouraging the baby rabbits to play among the daffodils, primroses and snowdrops. Every time a baby rabbit darts from the hedge to take centre stage on my friend’s lawn we both leap up with her three and half year old daughter to catch a glimpse of the rabbits – now named Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail (original names I know!). We try and stand like statues and whisper commentary to each on what the baby rabbits get up to – we are mesmerised. One can’t help but hope the resident Kites and Peregrines don’t get their fill of these delightful creatures any time soon.

Spring seems to make the most simple and natural things in life a most gratifying wonderment, for this quality I imagine if one could greet Spring, one would embrace it as one does when meeting up with a fearless friend.

I think of all the millions if not billions of bulbs nestled in the earth and how they are growing and moving all the time, just getting on with life. The roots are labours and anchor their roots further into the darkness of the soil as if a tireless minor, for there is too much at stake to stop. After some time the relentless work of the roots form whole spaghetti junctions, allowing the water and precious nutrients to travel to the bulb, who in time will expend the hard work and energy of those roots into a beauteous blooming flower. This is what we humans see and behold as the greatness of the bulb, and yes the blooming flower of the bulb can lift one’s spirits and provide nectar for the Bees. Yet to me, the unseen depths the roots went to produce the great outcome are as beautiful if not more beautiful than the pleasing flowers we spy on the riverbanks and the roadsides.

Here comes a correlation between a human and a bulb. The moment when one recognises one’s own roots have been exhausting themselves in the depths of one’s own dirt/ earth in order to keep the exterior of the self/ one’s blooming flower rich in nutrients. In all this striving one forgets how the light gets in at all.

When one’s roots are in the winter of one’s soul and paving through one’s darkest fears it seems one is dormant, living and yet not living. Yet in time, one finds that the depths one’s own humble and disparaging roots have gone to have indeed granted the blooming face of one’s exterior, now re-energised to encounter the raw world again in a different light, not just in the darkness of the soil filled soul we carry with us. The flower experiences both the gentle caress of the Bee landing on a petal and in contrast the pelting of an April shower. The bulb remains contained; reserving itself for the next winter.

In spring one can often find happiness, anxiety melting away, when previously one had gone somewhere dark and disturbing. Today I breathe in and find the lungs embrace the oxygen differently than before.

“ I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly, that just to be alive is a grand thing ”

Agatha Christie