Something Beautiful

Something Beautiful

• Friday, February 3, 2017

I saw something so beautiful inside.  It was clear and blue and warm, it was complicated and destructive, it held my gaze, and it was beautiful and then it died.

Beauty is the spring time.  That is when I come alive, with the seeds and the green.  For some, the beginning of spring is the day you set your clocks forward, for many pagans, the spring arrives with Imbolc.  For me, the spring comes with the first new sprig of green I see in the woods.  The second those bluebells, hyacinth, lunaria and iris start pushing up through the cold earth and stretching up towards the weak sunlight, that's when spring begins.  It begins when the beauty of winter has turned to brittle barrenness and the ground is suddenly dusted in that fine, new grass beneath the frost.

The crab apples, pears and plums wither in their sacks and ferment.  When they slough to the ground, the earth smells like mead and rot and magic.

Spring, to me, is everything beautiful and right. It signifies the beginning of something old and new at the same time.  The wheel is the same every time, you know?  It turns endlessly from one season to the next.  The leaves grow brittle and bare, they grow green and nubile, they grow heavy with fruit, they grow brown and bony.  It's a system that continues on and on forward.  It's a clock to me, a grand clock by which everything that matters can be measured.  I measure my progress each spring; my seeds, my plants, my work by the increasing warmth of the land and the rise of the sun- by the change in constellations and the way the land grows and ebbs and breathes.

Just as the winter is sometimes personified as the Hag and Hunter; the spring sometimes is personified by the Virid Virgin and the Green Man; they symbolize the pure growth of new life before it enters is stage of sexual reproduction and fecundity.  When the flowers bloom and open to the world for the bees to pollinate and the wind to break, they will be in the garden of the green man and woman, of those old gods of woods and trees and soils, they'll be cared for by the next personified season.  Spring is here to cook up life to be served deliciously to us all.

My Yew.

I saw something so beautiful.  It was growth, it was destruction, it was bones covered by moss and black fungus.  It was ripe ferns unfurling and stretching along stumps and hillsides.  I saw glassy saps gushing from between the split legs of an old pine.  I got drunk on the smell of petrichor and withered leaves; I fell asleep to the sound of frost cracking along the creeks.

Winterstide is ending, here comes the Spring.