line
between Winter and Spring, joy and sorrow, darkness and light
I have a small elder bush on my windowsill. Elders are dramatic plants, dying off almost entirely when first planted before being reborn from the root. This one I have kept indoors all winter, but it still sensed the turning of the seasons and dropped its leaves. Once again I thought I had killed it, but today I found tiny leaf buds swelling on each branch. Spring is coming, the sun returns, the growing season is about to begin…and, for the first time in my memory, I find myself mourning the passing of winter.
Like the pause between inhale and exhale, this time of year hangs between intake and output. Spring means growth, going out again and doing things. I want to stay curled up on my couch with my knitting. I’m not ready for the final push through the school year. I’m not ready for the planting season to start. I’m certainly not ready to begin preparing our house for sale. Mostly, I’m not ready for my sister to get married next weekend. Not only because we have a seemingly endless amount of things to do before then, but because change does not come easily to me. I’m happy for her, ecstatic even; she could not be marrying a better man, and they could not be better suited to each other. But our sister, who should have been her maid of honor, won’t be there. Our parents, who always want to be supportive but don’t know how to be, have turned this process into a perfect storm of constant triggers. And, because I haven’t been this involved in planning a wedding since my own, it’s brought up a lot of shit from that time. I can feel myself fighting to remain positive and supportive instead of reactive, fighting to remind myself that there is a line between offering the information I wish I had had going into marriage and putting my own trauma onto someone else. I’m flirting with that line like an acrobat. It’s all about balance, and I’m struggling to regain mine.
I find it interesting that, even though both the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes are days of perfect balance, I tend to lean into that aspect more deeply in Spring. And here I am again, returning to that theme, desperately needing to ground myself before the wedding, before Spring comes in earnest, before the year moves on without me. Balance in this season of my life seems to be about finding the good and beautiful in the trauma narratives I have gotten stuck in. Negativity bias is biological, I’m aware of that. I know that my brain’s tendency to hold onto pain more strongly than joy is a self-protective instinct as automatic as a limbic response to fear. But, like most such instincts, it’s a double-edged sword. I spent so many years burying the pain that it is still letting itself be known incrementally, usually surfacing at the worst possible time. Memories that hold the pain I am still processing are draped in black, muting the colors I once saw. I want those colors back. I want to learn how to hold the pain alongside the joy, even to experience the full range of emotion contained in each memory without limiting myself to the ones I think I “should” be feeling. Holding joy and pain at the same time has got to be one of the most difficult acts of balance I have ever attempted, but a wedding with a prominent empty seat demands it. I don’t know how we got this far without her humor, her organizational skills, her ability to deflect our mom’s stress with laughter, her tremendous heart and boundless energy, her love—but we have. We’ll make it. We will.
Today the wind turned bitter again, rain turned to ice, the temperature dropped and dropped. “Not yet,” says the Mother, “not Spring yet. But soon.” I missed the sun, but I wasn’t sorry. Like my elder I am only beginning to bud, not yet ready to unfurl. More cold lies ahead, but there will also be sun. Always it is there, just beyond the clouds, just below the horizon. There is no night so dark that it can prevent the sun from rising, no Winter so cold that it can refuse to thaw. Not one. I stretch my leafless branches towards the clouds, my roots finding unfrozen water below, and I wait. The light increases day by day, color is returning with the birds, and soon there will be flowers. My family will be one person more. Breathe in, pause.