Early Spring and Learning to Trust the Process

Late March and early April has always been my favorite time of the year.

The soil in my garden, still wet from recent snow, sprinkled with some of last autumn’s dried up leaves, is pregnant with the blooms that will soon appear. I run my bare hands on it, inhaling that earthy scent of petrichor. I exhale, happy to not have accidentally broken the tippy top of a hyacinth I didn’t remember being planted.

The soil is constant in its strength.

When there was three feet of snow a few weeks ago in my garden, I asked myself, are the daffodils and the hyacinths going to come up this year? Were they able to breathe under all that snow? The snow eventually melted, first giving way to a brown landscape and, soon after, tiny green shoots that would become full-fledged celebrations of yellow and violet.

Speaking of breaking, at the tail end of winter, I always feel that I am very close to being broken. The constant cold, the grey skies, the waiting for buses in storms and frigid temps. When spring arrives, it’s a bit suspicious to me. I had forgotten during winter what it feels like to walk around comfortably, to see color around me, to absorb the warmth from the sun’s rays. But I have also soon forgotten winter.

I sometimes have to remind myself to trust the process of life. To relax in the knowing, the certainty, of resurrection.

Today, on Easter, I welcome spring, rebirth, new beginnings, the new astrological year, and the potential to blossom into something I wasn’t even expecting, like that extra hyacinth bulb I forgot I planted.