And here she is again, daughter come back up again, returned to us and to the world above, for another while yet to come.
The circle has turned, is turning still, and we are returned again, too.
To the outside, to the soil, to the land, to ourselves, to the light.
I have written about the Spring Equinox in both my books, and in this one I co-authored, and I’m writing about it for my third, too. Sometimes things take root in us and refuse to be uprooted. I write about the ways that, contrary to what I know to be the experience of most people, the way I have long encountered spring is not through joy, hope or even relief. For myriad reasons (all deeply emotional, their roots firmly in the soil of the colonial, traumatised land I was born on) I struggle—hardly surprising I imagine—with putting down roots. With ideas of the land at all really, who gets to be there, what it all holds.
With the timeline, too.
The timeline of spring.
Time has done what it does—since I wrote those books, since I was that wee girl with all the grief and loss and pain in that first frightening spring—and I have been carried along in the (sometimes soft, other times fierce) insistent flow.
Here I am on the first Spring Equinox of my 40’s, and I woke, for the first time in my life on this day, really truly full of hope.
Full of the deeply rooted sense of belonging to the day, to the turn, to the return of this cusp moment in our circle.
For there was never any line at all, of course.
It has always been a circle.
And I have always belonged, as you have too.
As always we will.
And as the years have passed, with each spring that has unfurled since that one when I was a tenth of the age I am now, a spring I spent years in addiction because of, years in therapy to try to heal from, a spring that for a long time I said had stolen away the wee girl I once was:
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