The winter birds are gone now, and the daffodils poked their infant green into the light of the grey days sometime around the last new moon. It often happens this way — a hard freeze, a night of no moon, then sudden stiff green tips barely seen in the near frozen dirt, and a burst of excitement — a sigh of relief even — in knowing that the cold will give way to green again.
The robins have returned. They came in right before the big freeze, and I think we lost a few. More than birds perhaps, from the smell of decay that comes from between the wooden fences that are back to back behind our yard; some small creature fallen to the cold. But everywhere there is life too, and this morning I heard the robins for the first time since their return.
February sits on the cold fence between the inner work of winter and the sunny, wind-lashed exuberance of spring. Part of me longs to linger by the fire, in inward spaces of medicine spirals and planning for the year. Winter holds for me a depth that is hard to describe. It is a place of deepest knowing of self, sometimes in hard ways, and of nourishment and heady magic. In some ways it is like walking between the worlds for a whole season; a place where the heart can be healed, and seeds of transformation fall on the fertile essence of spirit, waiting….
It is hard to leave those deeps. But we are long into winter now, and its hold weakens as an urgent energy tugs at my heart with the longer light, two months growing now. I too, am on the fence, in a tug of war between the firelight cocoon of still dark iron-cloudy days, and the imperative of buds on the trees, where the ravens have also returned. They all risk the wrath of winter’s last word, defying the waning chill, and leaden clouds, but there is no resisting the call of new life; not for them, not for me.
For a week twelve seed packets have rested on my altar, absorbing my love and gratitude. They are this year’s medicine, all plants that grow in my state. The medicine will come from watching them grow, and delighting in each new leaf shoot. It will come from the care given, and the teas, tinctures and ointments gifted by the plants, and from the process of making all those too. Some of these additions I could easily find in fields and woods here, some not so easily — they hide. But planting seeds is a pledge to the future, and a rainbow bridge of relationship to the plants we love.
Spring wins the tug of war. My prayer plant has new shoots, telling me it is time to begin my starters. The fire fades as I take up my packets on this very cold day, trusting the voices of the daffodils and tree buds, that is it time.
Honoring:
Eclipta…Self Heal…Motherwort…Lemon Balm…Saint John’s Wort…Lobelia…Gravel Root…Burdock…Bergamot…Violet…Nettle…Pleurisy Root…
And giving them welcome.