SPRING

In Chinese medicine Spring represents the WOOD PHASE and corresponds with our Livers, the emotions of anger and frustration, the eyes and vision, rebirth and emergence, growth, creativity, renewed hope, and the color green. Poetry that nourishes our Wood elements is filled with the correspondences of Spring and the Wood Phase.

SPRING:

        I wrote Spring during the first weeks of springtime after taking a walk with a good friend in the hills near my mother’s house in a relatively rural part of Los Angeles. We actually did come across this brook trickling in the night. We couldn’t see it, but in the silence of that night, I remember we both paused to listen to it, as it slowly gurgled its comforting and gentle tune through the grass and darkness.
        Although the brook wasn’t speaking English (of Spanish for that matter), when we left I remember being filled with this silent knowledge, a palpable teaching inside me, and the distinct feeling that something in me had changed. That change was the newness of spring and my emergence from the death and grief of a recent relationship’s ending. This little gift of a brook in the night seemed to confirm and catalyze a shift in me towards greening. I even remember the joy I felt transcribing each word of this poem from my body onto the paper that night.
        This poem reminds us that we are not alone in our feelings and transformations, that nature hears us and is right there with us, even (and especially) in our darkest, most lost moments. We are reminded that by being true to our insides, we find resonance and assistance on the outside. Our prayers are answered in one way or another. In this case it was the light, flowing trickle of the night’s water that directly touched the night’s water inside me. The night’s water is winter’s death, but more prominent than the darkness was a lightness and renewal that I felt in that water—the harkening of spring, with all its promise, hope, and newness emerging from the depths of winter’s dark watery night.
        I confirm the courage and my gratitude for wholeheartedly and honestly living through autumn’s grief and winter’s death in the last lines of Spring. To earnestly feel spring’s renewal, I had to know the water’s death. After loss—actually seeing and experiencing that I could live and feel lively again—affirmed and reassured the importance of giving myself to this natural cycle of death and rebirth, so evident in the transformation of winter to spring, and captured in the eternal wisdom of the Five Phases.
        As the poem conveys, the willingness to be transformed by life is the only life I know how to live, or to be lived by. Ultimately it is the only way, for me, worth living. Perhaps it’s just the nature of being a double Scorpio.

(Click on the symbols below)