Notes from Spring

Spring drew on… and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.

Charlotte Brontë

But the true nature of the human heart is as whimsical as spring weather. All signals may aim toward a fall of rain when suddenly the skies will clear.

Maya Angelou

Go grab your favorite cup of coffee (or tea, if you prefer tea) in your favorite mug, find a sunny spot around, and curl up. If you have a cat or even better, cats, do let them know they are welcome. We are going to talk all things spring, poetry, and the art of being present (with a healthy scoop of existentialism, of course).

The world continues to warp around us, but spring is here as always, the buds poking their heads up as they have done for centuries, the blades of grass continue to flutter in the breeze, following their own meditative rhythm. And so should we.

You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space, to dream, and to connect.
― Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto

You know, when I was little, I imagined if I could choose a name or a month I would have loved to be born in, I would say April. Though, being a May child is close enough.

But May is the child of summer. And spring has my heart.

And even though it is not so warm yet, I cannot wait to ditch my so many sweaters and jackets and scarves and appear out of it all, in my white tee and shorts, barefoot like Heidi, and run down the green slopes of the Alps, feeling light as a feather.

I can see daisies, daffodils, and dandelions, sprouting all around the place. I am beginning to run into more and more neighborhood cats coming out of their secret gardens. The cherry and plum blossom trees have started sprinkling the boulevards with their pink and white spring showers. Come to think of it, without trees to remind us, there are no seasons.

The more I observe the spring trees with their buds and blossoms, the sky that continues to grow brighter and ever so bluer, and the birds that are getting livelier and fluffier, twittering heartily, the more I see all that is wonderful in them, and all there is to learn from them. The tree facing my window feels like an old friend, changing with me. I invite the birds to my balcony, enticing them with sunflower seeds. When I work out, as much as I would be delighted to be mistaken for the swaying branch of a tree by the birds, I lack the grace and loving wisdom of my wonderful old friend. I like the certainty of its steady presence. I learn from its ever-changing frame and flexibility while being rooted in one place.

When I moved here, it was completely bare. The birds still held on, clipping at some buds that seemed so tiny that I felt they weren’t even there. I thought the tree was dying. There it was, brown and bare, standing in the middle of this floral cornucopia and a flurry of green flittering fullness of all the other trees in the area. And just when I grew fond of its bareness, urging it to hang in there, it sprung to life. Almost overnight. Like a miracle. Na. Scratch that. A miracle. For it was a miracle.

This Morning by Mary Oliver

This morning the redbirds’ eggs
have hatched and already the chicks
are chirping for food. They don’t
know where it’s coming from, they
just keep shouting, “More! More!”
As to anything else, they haven’t
had a single thought. Their eyes
haven’t yet opened, they know nothing
about the sky that’s waiting. Or
the thousands, the millions of trees.
They don’t even know they have wings.

And just like that, like a simple
neighborhood event, a miracle is
taking place.

I Wake Close to Morning by Mary Oliver

Why do people keep asking to see
God’s identity papers
when the darkness opening into morning
is more than enough?
Certainly any god might turn away in disgust.
Think of Sheba approaching
the kingdom of Solomon.
Do you think she had to ask,
“Is this the place?”

How easy it is to take nature and what is natural for granted. Oh, the miracle of this body, the world that is alive! The poem the sun never ceases to write on the sky, with every rise and fall. The wind that roams the world, kissing everything. Gravity that never ceases to tell me that it wants me, a call I never fail to answer as I snuggle back into bed or the couch for a few more minutes of napping. I am grateful. There is much pain in the world, there are days when I feel like a blank and everything feels dreary and pointless and yet I am grateful for what is. Throughout the day, I follow the sun. I stay by the window. The sky helps me breathe. I check on it again and again just to make sure it’s still there.

I too have known loneliness.
I too have known what it is to feel
misunderstood,
rejected, and suddenly
not at all beautiful.
Oh, mother earth,
your comfort is great, your arms never withhold.
It has saved my life to know this.
Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning.
Oh, motions of tenderness!

– Mary Oliver, “Loneliness”

I really feel connected to the tree. I am beginning to understand and root myself in its stillness, and move, and find a whole another life in it. There is no need to go anywhere. Everywhere can be found anywhere, if you look close enough and have enough love in your heart for it. Though, with the water in us, we are bound to grow restless too, and in that, we ebb and flow like the waves. The land, water, and air bind us all together and set us free.

On some afternoons, I can feel the tree, all of its being looking and feeling, alive, gracious, and open, with a loving gentle gaze that doesn’t understand fear or separation, so at one with the sky above, the ground below, and open to what life chooses to surround it between the two. In my friend, I sense no divide between the perspicacious mind and the warm beating heart. The immensity of it, the humility of it. All I seek in a God, right here.

I admit I feel a bit deformed in the face of this company. A part of me is spiritually stunted shaped by the noise none of us can escape. A thigmotropism of sorts. Though whatever we have kept away, open only to the sky, continues to grow more and more, deeper and fuller and further inwards and outwards. A corm of sorts, a silent room for the mind. Though I love the moments of stillness when the door to that room opens and the conversations that sometimes flow from there.

Have you felt the stream of eternal time that we can only touch for a moment yet never imbibe? Here’s an exercise. Find a tree, a plant, a flower, anything in the wilderness or in the balcony outside your window. Or the sky. And for some time, sit still and give it all of your attention. Observe. Do not seek to dissect. Just stay in the moment with it, at its pace. Imagine you are the sky. The tree. The plant. Think of the hours that seem to go on endlessly. Experience how time expands and slows down. Take a deep breath. And then notice, in contrast, the world around, running at such a high speed, burning through time. We think if we pack a lot in a short amount of time, we can expand how we experience time. But seems like we have it backwards. All my life, the moments that I can replay in slow motion, that seem to grow even more immense as time goes on, were moments of inner stillness and slowing down, what is called ठहराव (Thehrav: the stillness that comes with patience, calmness, and the quality of being relaxed, with a still quiet confidence and contentment) in Hindi, moments when the door to that secret room of the mind opens up and the space where change first blossoms.

In India, spring is the season of temperate pleasant weather and arrives much sooner in the year. The wintery chilliness of the shade thaws and the cold wind, warmed up by the sun, turns into a cool pleasant breeze. I still remember how I knew as a child when spring came around. I still wore my socks, but the sweaters turned into vests. The potted plants on the terrace began to sprout buds- orange, yellow, and pink. My father moved his chair slightly towards the dappled shade. My mother took out her yellow saree and the season of Basant came around, filling up the skies with kites of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Children on terraces everywhere, in a joyful hypnotic state turned up like bright flowers looking at the warm blue sky full of milky white clouds yet untouched by the scorch of summer. Their mothers, gathering the crisp clean laundry smelling like the sun, constantly worried about them falling off the short balustrades, and shouted at them over and over again to be careful and were ignored. Shouts of Ai-Bo could be heard in each direction as kids engaged in competitions to cut down their opponent’s kite. One child’s kite set adrift in the free wind became another’s treasure, floating down from the sky. How many times did my brother get distracted by those shouts while doing his homework in that season? Sometimes a stray kite would land right by the bedroom window and how could he resist? He could even hear it coming down, if it ever got stuck in the branches of the Rangoon Creeper at the back of the house. He just couldn’t wait to get his kite up in the sky and how excited were we to write something on it so that if it were to fall into another’s hands, it would be like exchanging a secret message. The tiny words flew up into the sky, open to all, yet readable by none from that height, their fate resting on the winds.

I have read poems describing the beauty and abundance in autumn and even winter. And I know spring is the season where growth that has been invisible like an underground stream, sprouts through and is made apparent. It is the timid walk of newly sprung beauty on its way to become more and more flamboyant. I confess I love spring’s promise of summer more than summer itself. But what fascinates me even more is the back and forth between the realms of winter and summer that is inherent in this season. You can often see the sky split into layers of grey and blue and intermittent rain and sunshine. This is the season that prepares the mind to face everything with the same humility and composure, both joy and sorrow. A season that welcomes both weathers with open arms and holds in it the blossoming hope for a better tomorrow is truly a lovely one.

I also believe that the same is true of human spirit too. We need intermittent sun and rain. Spring showers are necessary for the growth that takes place in this season. Just as sunlight is. We too need change and challenges to grow as well as moments of love and appreciation.

As I look outside right now, I can see the tree yet again as I first saw it a year ago. This time, I can see the buds and I know how they will fill up the branches in a lush green gladness and filter out the scorching light from the summer sun into a beautiful kaleidoscope of komorebi that will play across my floors. But what I can also foresee is the autumn day when slowly, one by one these very leaves will float away like ghosts of the past and how I will try to catch them in my balcony, stowing some away in books, with a sinking feeling of something passing away and my own inability to capture and stay locked with them in an eternal spring. But I see the budding branches and they seem to dance and chime in, “We are here now. We are here now.” They seem to be saying, life is now. Always now. We are not a prequel. It is happening right now. And I answer back, “I am here. I am now.” And that is enough.

Sometimes when I am in a moment I find too beautiful for words, I find myself feeling tormented by its transience and my own inability to stop time and capture it. There are things I want to say to my dad that I felt no need to say back then but now I do. I want to ask him how with all he had experienced in life with all its sorrows, did he manage to keep all that was dark away from us and share only joy and love? Sometimes I want to tell him how having him in the world made me feel invincible. But when I was invincible, I felt no need to tell him, the way I do now. The world has cracked up and I need so much love to fill it back up and it will still not be enough. I feel so afraid to ask for it.

These days, I do feel a little lost and dejected but also full of hope and anticipation, as whimsical as the rain and shine of April. I feel like the world around me and my life can no longer be taken for granted and left on autopilot. It is no longer a question of expectations and walking on paved roads. The linear gameplay has been replaced by an open world. I feel like I am walking through a wild forest and as much as I am gleefully startled by its surprises and enchanted by its strangeness, in awe of the many little paths that can be carved through it, I also miss the guidance and companionship of the road well-travelled, saturated by road signs and set ways and times of doing things, the mainroads of existence that are tried and tested.

Especially in my 30s, I am beginning to discover that the more I try to find my own path, the lonelier it gets.

I am beginning to understand our reliance on systems and traditions, generation after generation. Why we need all the ways to distract our minds for they are prone to look at the abyss of the infinite universe. Ask a suffering man and he will tell you why the finitude of our bodies and the forgetfulness of our minds as we slowly grow senile is a blessing too. Why it is important to go through the decline that comes with age, to detach from the life we do come to love, especially since it is finite. How many times do we find some moments momentous especially because we know they will not last except maybe as a wonder memory and a finite one at that.

I always imagined freedom as a blue sky with its immense possibilities. But the endless skies eventually open up into an immense blank space where, whether one is prepared or not, terrible beauties await. And life till now has not given us a wide palate for relishing those cosmic scenes with calmness. For faced with a completely empty dark space, face to face with a cosmic event, who would not miss a sunny windowsill blessed by a house cat, unread books, and unwashed coffee cups, opening into a busy street teeming with people and their dogs and their vehicles, where meaning is still being made, unmade, like a bed full of dreams indistinguishable from reality?

Faced with freedom, it is natural to feel lost. In those moments, I try not to look away from the tree outside shaken by the wind under a stormy sky. For spreading your branches to the sky does not mean opening yourself up only to its blue immensities. Freedom may not offer the same shelter that cages do. But you can take a deep breath and brace yourself and pray for an openness to face anything that may come, rain or shine. Spring is a living proof of this.

The weather changes so drastically in a couple of minutes these days, it is startling. The tree holds my gaze as the sun grows dim behind the clouds, swaying in the breeze, and it continues to do so as the sun beams brightly on my face once again. It is almost saying, soothingly, “It’s okay. Everything is okay. It is all the same.”

Lately, I have been watching Korean series again and I am glad I am. Their slow pacing and attention to the little details of ordinary life remain unmatched. These days, I am watching a series called “Would you like a cup of coffee?” and every time someone drinks coffee in it, which is a lot many times, I find myself making a cup too.

I am also napping a lot lately. Something to do with the change of weather and being in my 30s I guess. I am discovering that for taking naps in the spring sun, there is nothing better than reading poetry and dozing off till you are half awake in the poem and half dreaming it into being.

(For this spring season, here are some of my recommendations 🙂

I attended a marketing presentation last year which talked about how humans tend to make most of their decisions based on emotions rather than rationality, that is, heart over mind, contrary to what we might want to believe. And it is so easy to spend a lifetime fooling ourselves into thinking otherwise. And if that is so, we come to realize, how important it is to take care of how you make yourself feel, how you make those around you feel. It is easy to shove your feelings under the carpet because you don’t have time for them. But believe me, if left unattended, they can run the show, even from the sidelines.

(By the way, did I mention, horror and psychological thriller happen to be their favorite genres?)

The world is an overwhelming place to be in right now. I get it. But look at how spring arrives nonetheless and spreads itself over everything. Our joys and sorrows alike. And that too is a lesson. I am beginning to realize that when faced with irresolvable problems, when you are in the weeds of existence, it might be easier to focus on planting your garden. Instead of being hyper-fixated on what it is that you cannot resolve, focus your energy on things that you want to do, things that make you happy, small healthy habits that seem possible to accomplish, and things that are in your control.

Like spring cleaning. Like making art. Like dancing.

And slowly, you will find the wildflowers overtaking the weeds.

So, what are you planning to plant in your garden this season?

Just remember, all the raw materials that make you your most authentic self are already there with you and always have been.

I read Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man recently, and came across these lines:

And I wonder how they make you feel.

(Also, do you share my love of old brown books?)

Let me sign off with another poem by Mary Oliver, and I will leave you with a sweet aftertaste of her words.

(Until next time, take care and don’t forget to stop and smell the roses! 🙂

On Meditating, Sort Of by Mary Oliver

Meditation, so I’ve heard, is best accomplished
if you entertain a certain strict posture.
Frankly, I prefer just to lounge under a tree.
So why should I think I could ever be successful?

Some days I fall asleep, or land in that
even better place — half-asleep — where the world,
spring, summer, autumn, winter —
flies through my mind in its
hardy ascent and its uncompromising descent.

So I just lie like that, while distance and time
reveal their true attitudes: they never
heard of me, and never will, or ever need to.

Of course I wake up finally
thinking, how wonderful to be who I am,
made out of earth and water,
my own thoughts, my own fingerprints —
all that glorious, temporary stuff.