Spring Forward

Today is a complex day.  It is my mother’s birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, and just a few days shy of Spring Equinox.  It is the 3 year anniversary of the death of my good friend and mentor, Donald Michael Kraig, and the approximate date of my uncle’s death 4 years ago, (though the actual date of his passing was never confirmed.) I am in a contemplative mood, thinking of all of the birth and death and revelry that occur on this date.  Today my best friend and Maiden moved to Scotland, to follow her heart and begin a new chapter in her life.  Tonight another friend confided to me a small victory in a life long struggle.  It is a powerful time.  One could argue that all time is now, so all moments are equally potent, but in my experience there are certain nodes that catalyze energetic activity.  Spring Equinox is one of those times for me, and often marked with stark and sudden change.

For Wiccans, and to a larger extent contemporary Pagans as a whole, we are taught that the Solstices are times of transition.  The Light begins to wane after Midsummer, and the Light begins Wax after Yule.  This shift in the balance between day and night is often represented as a metaphor for energetic movement.  The Spring and Autumn Equinoxes are times of balance, when the day and night are of equal length.  Yet I find that my real world experience does not match up with these assumptions.  Instead, Yule and Midsummer are steeped in traditions and for the most part, less surprising.  The Equinoxes always unleash some kind of odd surprise.

My thought on this is that Nature abhors equilibrium.  Stasis is death, non-movement is not a natural state, regardless of what we were taught in school.  Movement is the engine of life, and as a result, that one brief moment of balance contains the catalyst of something new.  Like a spring wound tight and ready to explode.  The times of transition give rise to a more stable type of energy, because change is a constant, and that kinetic energy is channeled into something productive, rather than bound flat.  The Equinox is when I walk wary, and feel apprehensive.  The energy of the season is bottled up, magnified, and likely to be released in surprising ways.

This year all of the plants in my yard are blooming.  This is interesting, as I have neglected to fertilize or care for them in any significant way.  Each of the citrus trees that I salvaged from my uncle’s mad garden are covered in flowers, as well as the peach tree, and the volunteer roses.  The children have been out and about, and have hung Gasparilla beads to honor the Ancestors and the Fae around the yard.  I take the flowers as a good sign, but keep in mind that most of the petals will fall.  Every seed does not thrive, and every blossom does not bear fruit.  It is important to choose carefully what to sow at this time, and keep in mind that nothing is guaranteed in this life.  Carefully laid plans will be overturned.  Sometimes we lose the things that we love the most, regardless of how hard we work to nurture and sustain them.  This happens at random, there is no reason or design for these catastrophes.  Pagans are ritualistic folks, we tend to oversimplify things.  To look for answers and tell ourselves stories to extrapolate meaning.  This is fine as a coping mechanism, provided that we do not discount the power of chaos, change, and the unpredictable.  Too often I see folks tell themselves and others that everything happens for a reason, and this type of thinking can easily give rise to feelings of guilt or shaming. Guilt and shame are completely useless emotions to indulge in past the point of recognizing it is time to create new patterns. Sometimes shit happens.  It doesn’t matter if it’s chemical or supernatural.  Random is as random does.

However, the up side is that sometimes fantastic things also happen for no reason.  Unexpected opportunities abound.  Some chaos is beneficial to introduce new growth, and create a bridge to the next cycle.  Again, I turn to my garden for a metaphor, and it provides.  There are two heaps of pumpkin plants.  Sprouting up where the rotten ones fell last Samhain, beautiful, strong shoots rise up from the rotten muck of last year’s offerings.  We never did get the chance to carve them (and honestly Jack ‘O Lanterns have a brief shelf life in Florida to begin with) so we just kind of hung onto them until Thanksgiving.  The kids discovered they were getting kind of wormy and forgotten, so I tossed them into the Henge to see what would happen.  They disintegrated, and it seemed like these new plants sprang up out of nowhere.  The funny thing is, there are random pumpkins growing in the front yard too, and in weird spots all over.  We have no idea how that happened.  Every time they get mowed down, they spring back up, hopeful to make it to another day.  We are happy to see them, and wonder what other new growth this season will bring.