Before we dive in this week, I want to extend a warm welcome to the flurry of new readers to this page. I’m so delighted to have you all here
W E L C O M E !
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Now, let’s begin !
My daughter came in from the woods by our house two days ago and told me she had sat with her back against a tree. As she sat there, she told me, she could hear a whoooooshing sound coming from within. It was talking to me mama, she said, her face shining. We wondered together had she heard the sap of spring rising, the tree getting ready to bud and leaf.
We are stepping across the threshold of winter and into that of spring. In Chinese Medicine that means moving from the Water element towards the element of Wood. And I can feel it outside. At the weekend I spent some time walking through my garden, getting down on my hands and knees to see which of the bulbs I had planted in autumn were going to emerge. There was SO much activity down there in the soil, soil that looked from my kitchen window to be still completely dormant. I rubbed my fingers across the earth and rumbled over the nubs as they pushed through – so solid and determined and headed UP.
I feel it within me, too. It is not complete, it is only a burgeoning, a nub pushing up through the soil. But I have started to gather and to sift, I’ve started to think about plans and ideas, think about my direction for the coming months. January and early February are for gardeners still quite an interior time. A time to flick through seed catalogues, plan what needs to be moved, dug, sown. I’ve also started to think about which seeds I want to plant and then nurture – both out there in my garden and in my life. When I first got a garden I wanted to plant ALL the seeds. I had excel spread sheets of what to sow and when, what had to be potted on and how, where each one would grow. I would say only a fifth of the seedlings survived. I simply couldn’t nurture that number of plants, my attention was spread too thin.
If I think back to that time of a million seed trays I remember feeling huge frustration in myself. I was a mum of three young children and on top of these three seeds that needed nurturing I was also attempting to do a gazillion other things. Businesses! Book! Websites! Redecorating! Planting! Landscaping! Exercising! I was sowing seed after seed after seed, casting them in every direction, into the wind.
Over the years I have learnt to hone, pare back, choose.
The Daoist philosophy on which Chinese medicine is based teaches that a spring energy (which is one of birth and upward movement) needs certain elements in which to thrive.
To begin, it needs to be emerging from the season before. It needs to have had the sharp frost, the dark mornings, the early nights – the rest and interiority – of winter and the Water element. Water is deep knowing. Knowing in our cells, our bones, our DNA. Any choices or plans we make need to come from here.
I love how Mark Hamer, in his book Seed to Dust, writes of the work of winter’s water underground:
The cold is busy doing vital work, sneaking between the grains of earth, lowering the temperature of molecules of water so they slow and cease their movement then expand and push the grains apart, so when the thaw arrives, the clods of soil on the surface crumble. It creeps into the cells of beasts and mingles with their being, as they breathe out warmer air that condenses into steam.
{ Below, as a paid subscriber, you’ll find more insights into what our Spring energy needs to thrive, along with some wonderful journaling prompts to work with.}
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