In the hour of spring

on light, on light, it is always, always light

Hello to each and every one of you from a grey west of Ireland, soundtracked by busy, beautiful swallows. This is a free post, and I hope you find something of joy and hope here within these words and images. I’ve not been able to be here much these last weeks, and I have discovered that lots more of you are here reading my words than before, for which I am deeply grateful; by which I am deeply humbled.

First, before the post, here is a wee intro to this substack. What you can expect and how it looks, more or less, in each season.

If you like what you read here, perhaps you might join our paid community of beautiful and nourishing folk. I promise you it is truly a glorious group of humans who gather there! Once more, thanks for being here. Kerri x

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The fourth week of the fourth month.

The year has begun to unfurl, despite the fog that hid away the valley much of the last weeks, the rain that fell most of Easter.

It’s spring and oh my heart am I ready.

It’s been a long, heavy winter, and there was a tricky start to spring, but it really feels like true spring has arrived. With it has come a sense of deep hope and bright, bright joy.

The week before last, after a gorgeous day together, my wee one said, as we snuggled up in bed, that he was going to have a baby. It was his beautiful, favourite rabbit toy, and she did indeed come out of his belly, and when she did he said: “mama, my baby has come, and she arrived in the hour of spring”.

It moved me so deeply, that phrase. He has been so taken by time recently, days, weeks, months, years. So intrigued by the seasons and the order of things; the when of it all, in the way of it all.

He turns four this week, which feels wild to me, and feels full blown magical to him.

It’s been a full on start to spring so far, and on the day he said this the bluebells in the hedgerows had been calling me by name; so much so that I pulled over just to listen. I’d been thinking about the fact that it’s been so busy I feel like I’ve not managed to enjoy the unfolding spring, a feeling I really dislike. I so desperately want to be able to lean into the gentle stillness I’ve been craving for so long. I don’t want to keep feeling like I’m missing the seasons completely as they unfurl. I no longer want to feel like I’m in survival mode; wishing time away to get to the top of the next hill..

This was sunrise on our first day waking up on the land we soon will live on properly.

It was glorious, truly a miraculous thing.

The call of the morning birds.

The sun dancing in through the spring hedgerow.

The way it felt like everything, every single thing, was touched by the light.

I have taken the paywall off this post that feels so pertinent to share at this point of the circle, almost exactly two years after I wrote it…

What does it mean to consider light?

And how do we keep on doing that in heavy, tricky times?

These are not rhetorical questions: I really want to hear your answer to this, friend.

How do you keep on?

At a time that feels so full of loss and grief, so held in darkness: what does it mean to you to sit and meditate on the light?

How do you find ways to be in the moment, the season?

To sit in this perfect, glimmering hour of spring, and simply allow yourself to be?

I have the deep and deepening sense that us entering, together, into dialogue of this nature may be the only way through….

What does community look like at a time such as this? How do we make it, partake in it?

Over the Easter break I was able to do something I’ve been desperate to do for many years. I was able to be with my child, regularly and freely, in community. In the community of mothers and children we both hold so dear. Since passing my driving test it has all felt, finally, like I imagined it would all those years back. When I fell pregnant in a global pandemic. When I lived in a place where I knew no one and everything stopped and I suddenly realised I needed a welcoming and loving community of mothers to hold me. And my oh my do I have that now. It will always be one of the most magical gifts of my home life, to have found this community.

We made spring wands, we had picnics in the woods, we made clay nests at forest school, we began to make our way back up from the winter’s dark.

I could not, this year, have managed to make that journey up from the underworld alone. It simply was too dark. It still is very dark but now it feels like there is light from others around me that is also mine to dance inside. That’s how it is supposed to be.

In the shelter of each other, the people survive.

I want to know how you’ve been supported in your survival this week by your community: however that looks. Your family, friends, the folk at your library or garden or the elder in the post office queue.

What words of wisdom, what moments of deep soothing, what light has been shared with you?

I’ve been thinking and writing, in extremely snatched edge land moments, about caregiving and what we learn from our other than human kin. It’s been living in me for so long now and I’m slowly trying to weave thoughts together, but yesterday I facilitated a brand new course for the first time, in my local area, called THE TREES YOU GREW UP WITH STILL REMEMBER YOU.

I will be offering an online version of this soon, and I can’t wait. One of the themes we explored was tree rings and growth: how some years we, like trees, have fallow periods. Years where it all seems to be running away from us, the circle of the year. Years where we feel the heaviness of the forest in ways we often don’t.

I returned, this afternoon too, to this post from this time last year, and found such depth of sustenance in the return.

I realised, too, that it was actually on the day of the full pink moon that he shared those gorgeous words - in the hour of spring - my wee one.

And it soothed me beyond words. This idea that in the midst of chaos and worry and so much worry, perhaps leaning into the possibility of a single hour of spring, one hour to linger in her grace and her light, might chance the course of a whole year; a whole lifetime.

In brightness, always. X