This is what you do

This is what you do: you spend the weeks of the new year scanning for signs of Spring, searching for new life; the tiniest green shoots, any hint of optimism. The world is asleep, almost dead, stone-cold and wet, leaden. You are weighed down with the waiting so that you forget that you are waiting. You forget what you are supposed to remember. You're in the fog of winter. The pointers sneak in stealthily, unheard, usually at night. And each one appears miraculously, snow drops, aconites, narcissus, daffodils, hyacinth. One day not here and the next waving madly from the ground in yellow and mauve and pink and white. "Hello! We have arrived!" It's as busy as can be. A fat bumblebee buzzing against my window, two yellow Brimstone butterflies, Blue Tits, yellow and blue and white, fat, too, playing together in the magnolia tree (did you know that their breasts become more bright depending on how many yellow caterpillars they have eaten), horses laying down in the field together, eyes closed, faces towards the sunshine. The tiniest beginnings of ornamental quince, hazel buds. Rose branches bent together in circular prayer.  Greenfinch, Goldcrest, Chaffinch, Wren. Skylark, Graylag Goose, Swan. Scores of Swans, heads down in flooded fields, as we whizz by marveling at the saturated water table, as we ooh and aah at the newest lakes. As we walk to the river and the path is a stream, and we stomp and slosh in rubber boots.

Tonight six planets line up in a cosmic parade: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Venus and Mercury. If you look towards the west half an hour after the sun sets you'll see them. I have a small telescope that I gave Charlie for Christmas and I shall line it up, like the boy in my Alexis Smith piece "Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge." I am giddy. I stand on the kitchen bench to take pictures of the sunset because we haven't seen the sun for so long. An alignment of planets feels like an Event. It feels like a jolly exciting party. (And how lucky are we to still feel that sense of awe! How lucky are we to be alive right now in this universe, when things are dying and being reborn, better, stronger, with more love, more joy, more harmony.)

Outside you can feel it, the unfurling of joy. The trees stretching their fingers up towards heaven, pandiculating their trunks, reaching towards the sun. I can't contain it (the joy) as I drive home from the horse. I stop on the side of the road, confusing other drivers (on a lane that entertains about eleven cars a day, three arrive just as I pull over). I run along the road, jump up on the verge and I take a picture of five horses lying on the grass. Two are rugged. Three aren't. One has its head on the grass, sleeping. There hasn't been a lot of laying down on the grass since Christmas. In a world where everything is guidance, this too is important. The horses are saying, laying down in the sun, kick off your shoes and walk on the earth, ground yourself, literally ground yourself by laying flat on it and letting the earth's energies flood through your starved system.

At six o'clock this morning we still didn't know what the world would bring. Dawn could go either way really. We sat at the round table in the kitchen and drank tea - his with a lump of sugar, mine in my grandmother's white cup - and talked for the first time in a while because he has been away in Berlin, birthing movies into the world. I woke up with this thought: Words are Magic. Everything we think and everything we say will shape the world we're creating.  And that is what we're doing, sitting here, across from each other, with our tea, with the rosemary and jade and oxalis, the green candles and orange tangerines between us, co-creating the world that we're stepping into. We have no say in it and we have every say in it. "Every moment," says Eliot, "is a fresh beginning," and that's how we're starting today, not looking back at things we did in the past, but gliding forward, together, cognisant of the fact that there are maybe twenty more summers. Twenty more days that mark the start of spring, like this, with tea and sorrell, and the faint hum of Radio 3 which turns itself on somehow at about a quarter past six every day, and I have no idea how to make it not do that, or how to change the station, so here we are, captive, with Thomas Tallis and Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Tawny Owl that has been hooting first thing in the morning and as I go to bed for the last three days. Creation, Michael Meade reminds me, isn't an event that happened once in deepest pre-history, but something that continues to happen every single moment of every single day, little spiral fiddlehead ferns, bursting fractally into life. My ballet teacher when I was five, Mrs Behrens, told me that the arms never stop moving in dance, and the same is true. Nothing ever stops moving, coming into being, moving through the cycles of life and death and rebirth. 

Joy for the Spring that's coming in. Joy for the stuff that's been shed. 

And then it comes, this sun, bathing everything, begging for us to be out in it, making everything sing.

May you be well. May all people and animals be well, and happy, and at peace.