Spring ~ time
Seasonal change, outside and within
Early spring is hard. I wrote a year ago about how I wasn’t ready for the sunlight to return to Anchorage.
This year, it’s not that. I welcome the sun. This year, it’s something else.
Time allows our patterns to emerge.
It’s like I’ve made it through real winter by a combination of white-knuckling and genuine enjoyment of the calm, quiet, dark. I make it through and then I get a glimpse of sunshine and warmth and the reminder is almost cruel. It’s here, but not. I’m warm, but not.
My body feels as dehydrated as my houseplants, the ones barely clinging to life. There are cures. I turn on my humidifier. I drink more water and less wine.
The promise of spring’s thaw asks, what’s next? What seeds will I plant, have I planted, that will soon begin to grow?
I forget that this is the creative portal. Sitting in the unknown.
It’s nice to think of ideas as springing out of me, except for that it’s false.
Springing - spring - does not exist in a vacuum. It’s the product of the other seasons, each tied to the next in an ever-rising coil.
Ideas form in the silence and the depths. My writer friends talk about how much time they need in aloneness in order to write.
I sigh and point my finger at my job, my relationships, my hobbies. Where am I to find the time?
I’ve done it before. Carved out hours each week. Stayed up late or gotten up early. Canceled plans except for those that feed my source.
This reminder is a gentle nudge that only I am responsible for my lack of production. I am the guardian of my hours. I can find time for what I need - I always do.
Perhaps the new season is calling me back to creative projects. I took a break but now am tired of the time away.
How I think about energy reflects where I’m at regarding inspiration. When I don’t feel inspired, I tell myself that my energy source is finite. That there simply isn’t enough for the project at hand.
When I’m inspired, I find energy everywhere. It’s not finite but instead it regenerates alongside my love for my work.
I see now that it’s okay for me to think my energy is finite in those weeks and months when I lack the inspiration to go on. It’s okay, and perhaps even helpful, to set projects aside and tend to other aspects of life.
But the season is changing. I am starting to yearn for what I had put down.
I am not a machine. I run off of inspiration: an energy that is probably best described as love. It’s mine to give and look after.
Sometimes I wonder if this newsletter community helps or hinders my creative inspiration. And then, I think, that is perhaps the wrong question. It’s not a binary, either or.
There are times when reading the words of others is essential to my writing. When I’m lifted and exposed and prodded to begin my work again.
And there are times when I can’t bring myself to open another email. When I must shield my gaze and look inward to the words that form behind my own eyes instead.
The season is changing. After two months away from my writing project, I feel almost ready to pick it up again.
Maybe this is what it means to love something by setting it free. I put it aside in January not knowing if I would be able to pick it back up. I put it aside because it was starting to feel like a chore. Life was calling me elsewhere.
My work will find me again, if it’s meant to. That’s the love I want and will accept. I set it free so that I, too, have freedom. So that I appreciate how precious it is, to get to have a dream.
Like the first signs of spring, it pulls me. A reminder of all that is within and yet to come. The season is changing. I’m starting to feel it again.
