driving into spring

The photo above was taken in October 2024 when I flew to BC to attend a breathwork retreat in Revelstoke. Tabitha, who lives in Idaho, picked up Mar and myself from the Kelowna airport and we spent the next few hours talking about our families and chickens and astrology. When I decided I wanted to attend said breathwork retreat back in August I felt like it would mark the beginning of something and I didn’t know what. It felt so good to be back in BC when things were quieting down before winter. Revelstoke is such a sweet little town and it was warm-ish but damp and magical in the way Fall always is. The smell of decomposition is in the air, indicative of rest.

Now it is Spring and we just had a full moon this past week, which, according to the farmer’s almanac is officially called the Worm Moon because the ground is full of melting snow and moisture so worms are coming to the surface and this is what Spring feels like. The circle of life continues and birds eat the worms and leaves from the Fall are able to actually decay and it’s all so beautiful. September has always been my favourite time of year but I’m starting to love its opposite, March, for the first time.

Lately I have been thinking about how dark things can get for me during Winter and how I sort of forget who I am when the world is covered in a blanket of snow. I can look in the mirror but I don’t see a familiar creature. I see a little alien who is light years away from home.

The other day I was at work and the sun came out in a way it hasn’t all winter. It was warm. And I felt all of the cells in my being exhale. My brain said it was too good to be true but my body knew otherwise. It felt like being home again after a really long trip. It felt like hearing a favourite song again that you had forgotten about for years.

A few years ago a road trip happened when my friend Hannah and I drove my sister Hayley back to BC to attend school again. It was near the tail end of the pandemic and it was Winter but on the coast Spring had already begun. The cherry blossoms were blooming out there. While driving through Manitoba I wrote on a piece of paper in the backseat that, “It takes courage to drive into your own Spring”. This trip felt like a physical push out of one very prolonged season and into something new and yet familiar.

Sometimes the seasons happen naturally. Actually, they always do. And sometimes we take action and make moves and drive ourselves out of one thing and into the other.

This year the seasons have begun to change and I feel ready for more of it. I am ready for the version of myself I become when the sun is allowed to be in full bloom.

And it’s funny because in my last podcast episode I mentioned how happy I am to be in this cocoon where I don’t exist on social media and can create without thinking about how to curate something for anyone’s consumption. I have wanted to make things and not also engage or participate in dialogue about what I am doing. But I am realizing how hungry I am for social interactions that are meaningful and true and honest. I deeply desire connection with people who are willing to wade into the scary territory of real vulnerability.

I feel like I want my art and my work to be a channel or hub for human interaction and I don’t know what that looks like entirely yet. Do I make an actual physical space where people can come and make art and just be with each other?

I’ve been really reflective lately and thinking about ways that I am and ways I have been here on this planet. Noticing things I have never noticed before. I was telling a friend recently it isn’t that I’ve been hard on myself lately, it’s that I have been seeing things about myself for what they are and they haven’t been pretty. I am not beating myself up about ways that I am, just noticing them like I am a third party observer and being curious about them. How sharp and quick my words can be. My impulsivity and how it can hurt people. The way I judge and separate myself from people in order to protect myself from intimacy.

These are good things to be aware of. Helpful to be able to identify and move on from. Old habits die hard but I am determined to mine what I can from these lessons and move on. My hope is that I can forgive myself for hurting myself and others so deeply when I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know it was just a season, it was just Winter. And I had forgotten who I was.

Now the sun is back and the rains are here to help the new life grow and I don’t even have to drive into the next season because Spring is here. It is always just a season.