Spring: Designed By Nature

Spring doesn't ask to be trusted. It just comes anyway — quietly, at the edges first, in the places you weren't looking.

If you have been in a long winter — of burnout, of depletion, of the kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix — and something is beginning to shift, this piece is for the tenderness of that returning.

It will not rush you into summer. It will not load the first green shoot with everything you've been waiting to become. It knows that is how spring gets broken.

Instead, it offers this: the felt truth of what returning actually looks like. Uneven. Non-linear. Going back to winter sometimes before it comes forward again. And underneath the green that the light is calling forward — your original colour, waiting. Patient. Unhurried.

You will meet it properly in autumn. But the seed is planted here.

Transcript

Something is returning A feeling, An unknowing That's okay Spring doesn't ask to be trusted It just arrives anyway Quietly at the edges at first In the places you're not quite looking But notice now how it arrives Not all at once No, Never all at once One thing at a time As if the Earth understands That a system is still waking Cannot receive everything all at once So first First the light shifts Just slightly The angle of it changing Arriving a few minutes earlier But staying a few minutes longer Then, Then there's the smell Before seeing Before any visible evidence That something is changing There's the smell Something underneath begins moving The body recognising Before mind has found words Something is different Something is landing And then the green Fast, Shocking, Almost Of something living Pushing through dark ground That looked like it had nothing left to give It doesn't ask for permission It doesn't wait for conditions to be met To be perfect It doesn't emerge only when it's certain The frost will not return It simply arrives Fragile but unstoppable at the same time And here is what I want you to know about that green The green is not the colour of the leaf But the green seen That vivid, Luminous, Particular green Of a leaf in spring Is merely the light landing When light meets living thing Calling something forward That has always been waiting Leaf turning towards sun Sun reaching back And in that meeting In that relationship between the light And the living thing Colour Colour is awoken Colour that could never have existed But this is what spring is doing As the light returns As something in your life Expressed in your body In the slow, Faithful restoration of a winter Genuinely rested in Beginning to shift A small, Tender curiosity A faint desire A distant sense that something Something might be possible once again This feeling This oh-so-tender feeling It is the light calling something forward Already alive in you Always there Always present Awaiting the right conditions To become fully visible But here is what spring also teaches That shoot That shoot that pushed through frozen ground Is the most valuable thing in the garden Valuable but also vulnerable With no protection No armour No guarantee that a late frost won't come Creeping in at night And take it back from where it arrived But still, That shoot It comes anyway Not because conditions are safe But because the intelligence inside of it Knows that the coming is the only way through And some days Spring goes back to winter A cold week arrives That feels like betrayal The brightness retreats The heaviness returns And you wonder if you imagined it all That feeling of arriving That newness of something coming back That tentative green at the edges But this This was no game of your imagination But purely the expression Of the cyclical nature of spring Not linear It never has been It moves forwards and back Warm and cold Open and contracted Not because it is failing But because this is how returning actually works Not in a straight line Towards the light In a slow uneven So if you feel it today That first small aliveness That quiet sense of maybe Don't rush it Don't lose the sweet smell of spring Don't take the tender green shoot And load it with expectation and mind's desire Load it with everything you have been waiting to do Waiting to be Waiting to become No, This is how spring gets broken Tender again So instead we protect it The way a gardener cups their hands around a seedling Not to contain it But to shield it from the wind it is not quite ready for Let it be small Let it be fragile Let it be exactly as much as it is Without asking to be any more Because this, This tentative, Unsteady, Quietly insistent returning Is not the prelude to your life It is your life This moment This small green reaching This body finding its way back towards the light And underneath it Underneath the green Underneath the response of the season Your original colour remains Waiting Through the winter Through the stripping back through every season you thought had been taken from you But know this now In this fragile green beginning of your spring The light is not creating you It is revealing you What was always underneath The truest colour The one that belongs only to you Before the world asked you to perform your green The most beautiful than anything the light alone could create So come slowly now The spring that is rushing is the spring that does not last But the spring that is tended, Protected, Allowed to be uneven and fragile and real That is the one that becomes a summer worth having So take your time now The light isn't going anywhere Not in this spring season