Edging Towards the Spring
Musings on micro-seasons and a new series of yoga classes to awaken the senses.
‘Born of the tilt of a sacred planet, the seasons provide what
has long been welcomes as Earth’s sacred rhythm, celebrated in rituals
that echo the cycle of mortal life - but in the mode of eternal renewal.’
Susan Murphy Roshi
Despite having been in the Northern hemisphere well over a week now- a landing made very soft by a reunion in Northern Italy with my husband and boys- I am still waking well before the dawn. It is said it takes a day per hour of time difference, and whilst I have not especially struggled to sleep, fully adjusting has probably taken the full eleven hour/day quota. But it hasn’t felt a burden. Accustomed to the longer days of an Australian summer I relish the excuse to watch the sun creep over the horizon behind the bank of trees in front of my house. Or listen to the already shrill and insistent birdsong - what I think may have woken me- that feels so different to the midwinter versions that I left behind. Already the chorus is abundant; the robins and blue tits who never stopped singing now joined by wren and wagtail, chaffinch and crow, as well as the wood pigeon and white coloured dove. They will only get louder from here.
Like when you see a small child after an absence, what has been a change in tiny increments to those living up close to it, feels significant to my now untrained eye. After five long weeks of being away, I have returned to what feels like an altered landscape and its whisper is of immense promise.
Officially it is still winter and I can see it has been waterlogged. The river that runs in front of our house is meeting its own high bank and rushing with a fervour that can be heard from the house. The lawns of the garden are saturated and any area regularly trodden is more mud than anything else. I have heard of this winter’s reported gloom and though I have missed a good chunk of it, have had enough of them to know the bodily way in which a yearning for winter’s end can accompany this time of year. We long for the light and turn towards it as a plant does, with impatience and often asymmetrically. It is easy to get ahead of ourselves right about now, and of course. If collective will were at the helm of the year’s wheel then I suspect it is these weeks, at winter’s tail, which would be the most accelerated. But in doing so we might miss what can be most compelling about this still sepia coloured landscape.
It is true that these weeks can feel especially long, even at times that we might be going backwards - March is still to come and is known for being capricious. But in the same way that a cat retreats before it is to pounce, or an archer needs to pull back the bow before the arrow might take flight, energy is necessarily building. And with it comes one of the most compelling of bodily feelings, which is that quiver of anticipation most felt deep in the belly; the knowledge that all that is good is still to come. We are on the right side of it all.
We are still a good month from the Spring equinox but everywhere are the signs of its eventual arrival. My front garden is host to drifts of snowdrops that add outline to the base of the rusted beech hedge. They are winter’s flowers but pull us into spring. Banks of daffodils, hopefully added to each autumn, are still mainly in bud but their direction is decided, upright and ready for the returning light. The odd one has unfurled as if to say look at me, look at what I am beginning. The blossom trees- apple and cherry and quince- look bare from afar, but get up close, as I did in all my circumnavigating of the garden in yesterday’s pale sunlight - and they are covered in tight buds. They might still be an impatience away from doing anything really but we know that they will.
It can feel a burden to still be in a season that always lasts too long, but this is also when the delineation of the year into four simplistic seasons feels most obsolete and clunky. For the real story is far more nuanced and needs a better language. Both the Japanese and Chinese traditions knew better, dividing their years into 25 seasons and 72 microseasons. Devised more than 2000 years ago in China originally and then borrowed and adapted in Japan, they have more seasons than weeks in the year, each lasting no more than five days. Born out of acute awareness, they invite the same, suggesting what might be happening at levels deeper than just the obvious. They recognise that even when not everything is visible, a lot is happening, and capture what is necessarily fleeting, in the same way that their tradition of the Haiku does. A micro season is at once a moment in time and a reminder of its flux.
The seasons generally teach us of the reliability of change, but micro seasons highlight the minutiae of it and in a language that charms with its poetry.According to the micros-season, we have just had the five days where ‘Rain Moistens the Soil’ and now find ourselves in the season where ‘Mists starts to Linger’. A few days more and the “Insects will begin to Hum’ before early March will bring us the time when the ‘Peach Blossom will Smile Open’. There is something that is both beautiful as well assuring about this recognition of the earth’s pulsating alchemy. And a calling to look a little deeper than we might used to, especially in the moments when we might feel most stuck. Things that are hidden are often no less distinct once we take the time to see them.
Seeing the world in this way suggests we are wise not to stop at the surface of anything, but linger in presence and so drop beneath the obvious story of any given day, with its weathers and outline. Here, at the level of a quickening earth, we might find ourselves somewhere much more enticing; amidst the mosses that gurgle in their watery abodes and where the mycelium are starting up new conversations, where roots are now widening and deepening to carry the weight of eventual growth and where the hazel blossom, so easily missed for all of its camouflage, hangs suspended, swaying like prayer flags in the mild morning breeze, spreading the news of change.
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AWAKENING TO SPRING - A YOGA SERIES on the SENSES
Yoga classes begin again tomorrow for a six week series that runs from Tuesday February 24th to Tuesday April As always they can be bought as a package ( and at a discount) or you might want to drop into singular sessions as and when it suits. They will be designed to work as a series but will just as easily standalone.
This Spring I am borrowing from myself and we will re-explore the senses. This is not out of my own laziness but purely because I found paying particular and deliberate attention to the senses last year completely transformed my experience of moving into the Spring - with each sense being brought to life by the week practice and then altering how I lived within the week that followed. After a long winter of dormancy, there is something really compelling about bringing the senses online one by one - a gentle way to move from hibernation to fully awake as we move from winter’s tail to the start of Spring. Beyond the theme, each class will be uniquely created - I am not sure I have ever repeated a class in all the years I have been teaching- so the content will both be new and relevant to exactly where we are in this particular year ( and micro season).
Classes are now available to book via a pass or as a single session. Tomorrow we will begin with the sense of sight, and how we might adjust and celebrate what is now a more distinctly returning light.