On Grief and the Spring | Monday, March 25, 2024

Today it is Monday, and it is sunny. I can hear birds singing in volumes I haven’t heard since before the fall. Spring is here, but it isn’t without consequence. I know I’m not alone in the difficult (albeit welcome) transition into spring. I can feel the Earth waking up. I have felt the Earth waking up.

This spring is different for a lot of reasons. For one, it has become harder and harder for me to appreciate the warmer days when I know what they mean. I know that they are challenging and confusing for more than just us. I see changes in blooming, frost bitten flowers and, in my periphery: a future of complicated and inconsistent weather. 

At first, maybe your life seems relatively unchanged. Or maybe there’s a subtle nagging feeling pulling at you in a place you aren’t quite sure of yet. This is likely the result of witnessing some of the most intimate and egregious forms of violence on humankind and on our Earth, and a sign of the precarity of our times.

If you are like me, it has been a process of further awakening to these realities which have helped make spring feel undeserved. This relatively newfound grief is in some ways evidence of a privilege I have had in not bearing it all along.

In the last decade, I’ve become acutely aware of the divisions and disparities which have long (and I mean thousands of years) been fostered, nurtured, and encouraged by the powers that be. There is still much to learn and I cannot be the one to give you permission to grieve for these truths, but I hope you are able to find the time and space to do so.

On the other hand, maybe the spring feels ‘wrong’ because we are not ready to move the way the Earth does. Rapidly, and without permission. The spring comes with only a single push. It takes only a series of warm days to send the trees to start budding new blossoms and leaves in a system of ever-engaging reciprocity. And like the spring, we may feel a wind of new energy, conflicting with the winter’s long and unrelenting grief. How do we reconcile these seemingly opposing realities?

In short: I’m not sure.

I am, in many ways, facing my own grief. For my family, for my friends. For our futures and our communities. For our world. I consider much of this grief to be necessary aspects of life. To have is also to lose and I, like many, am intimately familiar with both. Sometimes I’ll call this grief growing pains. But that is not what this is. A lot of what we are seeing today is a deep-rooted grief; one we must nurture and recognize as a call for radical social and systemic change.

How do we become inspired by the spring? Can we align with the momentum building around us, the energy we are witnessing? Certainly. But it will not occur without tremendous self-compassion, grace, and the showing up within your immediate communities, and yourself.

The self is a continuation. We have series of selves, which appear more like a set of concentric circles. We have our inner worlds, and then increasingly wider circles of community and environment. These are all extensions of the self. We must nurture and tend to each meaningfully.

Much of the spring is defined by a sense of action. But I want to remind you that action is much more like stewardship. Can we sit with ourselves, our communities, our environments and ask what needs to happen? How can we allow what is needed to flourish? How can we support the growth that makes sense right now? 

How do we tend to the relationships we have with our selves/communities/environments to create meaningful and sustainable change? How can we instead align with the radical gentleness of spring?

 There is this gentle guidance towards care that the Earth has allowed us to witness. I want to learn from it. I guess this is all to say that maybe there is a lesson in grief. Or maybe not so much a lesson, but a witnessing of the necessity for deep care to take place. I hope we listen to it.

Take Care. 

With love, 

S