soft boiled #120 – On Spring
Like birth, spring is messy.
Hello,
This is the season of ephemeral beauty. The Japanese call it mono no aware: the appreciation of the fleeting nature of things. This (slightly delayed) April letter is about spring. I wrote about how this fantastic, white&pink, joyous time can also be, paradoxically, a tough season. Do you remember this song by Lauryn Hill? Everything is everything, what is meant to be will be, after winter must come spring. We long for it, and when it comes, spring pulls the rug from under our feet. Like many beginnings, it can be merciless.
This letter began with a question: does a seed fear sprouting? We might not be prepared for what emerges from beneath the ground – the growth that arises from our depths after a long period of hibernation. New things grow from last year’s compost. It’s good, but it might feel scary. Often it’s messy. Spring announces: ready or not, here I come.
Enjoy this time of becoming (new),
Katarina
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On spring
The day when I left my winter jacket at home was always magical. It felt like a portal to the unbearable lightness of being. No jacket. Bright blue sky. I’d return from school in the afternoon and slip into a hoodie and canvas sneakers. New ones, because my feet had grown a bit in the meantime. I'd slam the door shut, the key dangling on a neon string around my neck, and head out to play around our block with friends. Then, an hour or two later, I would see my mom's head sticking out of the window of our ground floor apartment.
Kat! You hungry? she yelled.
Yeah! I’d reply, my voice low and distant, though she knew the answer anyway.
A few minutes later, she leaned out again. I ran to her, fast, stumbling on the grass in my pristine sneakers. I stretched out my hand, which was a bit longer than the year before, to catch a slice of bread she passed me through the window. It was smeared with a thick layer of cold butter. With my eyes closed, I took a bite and dashed away.
On those early spring afternoons, the sun grew strong, almost blinding. The trees in front of my room burst with thick green buds, while in the corners of the concrete sidewalks, fine grey dust gathered before being washed away by the first spring storms.
It was the winter dust, remnants of all things ground to finest grain. Composed of dirt, soil, and broken bits of old leaves—the leaves that were fresh and green when I first wore the old trainers that now no longer fit my feet, battered and discarded.
A few springs later, my feet stopped growing.
But growth takes many forms. Some are less palpable. Each spring in my adulthood, I remember what I happened to forget throughout other seasons: it might not be my feet, but a different feeling of tightness emerges once winter is over. Imperceptibly and quietly, we might outgrow the version of ourselves in winter hibernation when it seems like nothing is happening. Like roots, change often takes place underground in complete stillness.
And then the Earth tilts its axis, and everything is ready to be born. And just like birth, spring is messy. It cast a sharp light on the shedding skin of what no longer belongs to us, yet hasn’t completely left us. Spring ushers in growth that hangs upon us, and throbs inside our walls. Like birth, spring hurts, and spring laughs at the idea of the final version. What we thought we were.
Every morning since the spring equinox, I walk into the garden and pick a bunch of nettle leaves for tea. I don’t wear gloves. My hand is burning, but I like it. The sensation makes me feel alive—the burn keeps buzzing in my hand like an echo for the rest of the day.
You are beautiful, I whisper to the Sakura tree growing in my neighborhood. I’m counting: I’ve been watching her bloom for seventeen springs. Self-aware of her obscene innocence, she’s covered with fluffy pom-poms. I walk under her in a pink, soft shade, looking up. When I sit at a nearby cafe a week later, her flowers are already gone. Mono no aware. I find one dried pink petal in my coffee cup.
One night in March, I’m hugging the trunk of my beloved cherry tree in our garden. I’m pressing my lips against the rough bark, and I feel like my chest is torn open. It is the night before my landlord cuts her down. I’m taking it down. It’s always in my damn way, he says angrily. For the first time in 8 years, I won’t see her bloom. His cruel anthropocentric verdict cuts me right in the middle. I heal for weeks.
On March 11, my close friend’s partner dies suddenly.
I write: with a loud groaning, the winter lets out one last hunger. Winter claims what she thinks belongs to her. What cannot hold, will not hold.
Like birth, spring is a radical joy, too. I’m gently pressing the crispy, thick petals of magnolia. I smell lilac with my eyes closed. Making love on Easter feels like resurrection; it is one. The elements are shifting, the energies are whirling, everything is becoming, all—at—once.
Spring hurts, and the old trainers feel too tight. Spring hurts when walking barefoot, feeling everything very deeply with the soles of newborn feet. Wind lifts and whirls the winter dust, now woven with pink petals. Spring hurts. It hurts and hurts and then the pain ceases. Have I surrendered to the fact that there’s no final version of myself?
The complete trust in still becoming is the hardest place to arrive at—and the most freeing. The nest of constant change is a home you’ll never lose.
Is spring coming home?
This spring, over and over, I watch this video with Anne Halprin. She’s moving with, along, against, together the ocean. This is what it looks like to not be afraid of seeing life as a series of recurring questions. What it looks like when you trust with your whole body, with the vision of the self constantly becoming and dissolving, like ocean waves. It’s wise not to cling to the peak, it’s wise not to surrender to the pit. The only way is through it all – the highs, the lows, the middle. Spring, repeat all over again.
The goddess Psyche, often depicted as a butterfly, represents the soul. Implicit in the image is the messy rebirth of the identity: Within the cocoon, the caterpillar's body undergoes profound changes. It essentially liquefies its own tissues, breaking down its caterpillar body into a kind of organic soup. From this soup-like substance, the tissues of the adult butterfly begin to form.
In each season, nature has the answer for anything one might be asking. The overarching truth is that there’s no final form. The only permanent joy can be found in the alchemy of what has gone and what it will turn into.
On the first week of April, I get off the train in my hometown. My mother is still there. The bread’s on the counter, the butter in the fridge. I take off my new sneakers as I enter the apartment. You hungry Kat? I hear my mother’s voice from the kitchen.
(Like birth and like spring, writing often hurts, and this letter was born out of many drafts.)