While astronomical spring approaches in the northern hemisphere, the weather in south Florida is becoming increasingly hot. Our winter had fewer cool stretches than I recall in my nearly 20 years living here, which made for a more difficult dry season for gardening.
Spring is, for me, a bittersweet time. Having begun my growing season in September and October, the increasing light triggers my birthplace memories of my desire to plant, but the reality for my environment is that it signals the closure of the season. While I watch my tomatoes ripen and my collards seemingly double in size daily, I know that come June — or if I’m really lucky, July — it will all be over, squashed by heat, humidity, pests, and disease that make short work of temperate climate crops.
And so, even as I’m nurturing plants and racing to get last minute additions into the garden, there’s an autumnal feel to it: an acknowledgment that while I’m not gathering in just yet, it will be happening soon.
Susanne Jutzeler via Pexels
Close up of an orange poppy flower with many brown stamen
In these waning days, I relish in the last cooler breezes that rush in after the heat of the day quickly dissipates. There’s a delicious feel to how surprisingly cool it is to skin that’s been deeply warmed by sunlight all day. It’s like a lover’s light kiss on the nape of your neck, giving you gooseflesh and sending a little thrill down your spine.
Springtime is a time to reconnect with the sensual. In colder climates we spend time protecting, insulating, essentially attempting to armor our bodies in order to stay warm. It’s generally a time where people prefer staying indoors to exposing themselves to the elements. Especially now, when fewer people are required to work outdoors, humans have become fairly insular in the winter months.
While the same isn’t exactly true in warmer climates, there is a sense akin to a quickening that reverberates through nature. While I bemoan the end of my vegetable growing season, everywhere around me the native plant life is responding to spring in much the same way it does anywhere else. Though there aren’t a lot of deciduous shade trees, the ones that do live here, or have been introduced here, are beginning to bud. Some fruit trees are beginning to flower and pollen season is just beginning. Migrations are happening, mostly away from here, but we are a way-stop for birds flying up from South America.
It’s also a feeling that permeates into my home as well. Situated almost exactly at due east, my kitchen enjoys a few minutes early each morning acting as its own sort of henge. The rising sun just breaks the treeline, shining through the sliding glass door and illuminating the wall in my kitchen. It’s these little feelings that we need to spend time reconnecting with.
During that brief five or so minutes, I feel the sun on my body, warming me as I make coffee and prepare breakfast for my family. Outside, a mockingbird has been advertising his collection of calls, hoping to woo a mate. Hearing them, I’m less seduced than I am simply satisfied. The sensation of calm and rightness at hearing these calls makes my body relax and I’m overcome with gratitude.
I’ve written a lot in the last couple years about my life as an animist and how it has brought a more enriching feel to my Witchcraft. I write and talk about getting out into the world, experiencing nature, encountering spirits that you find along the way and working with them to improve our lives and the world in general. It’s an experience that is so vital and necessary if we as a species are to right our course and move into a more enlightened era. Old ways of doing things, as we’re witnessing right now, go down hard.
We are inundated with bad news and a self-perpetuating negative spin. If we’re not ever mindful, it can be easy to fall into the trap of pessimism and disenchantment. We face challenges that can feel insurmountable, but active optimism is an antidote. Re-enchantment is an antidote. Rewilding is an antidote.
We’re on the cusp of something, and we just need to keep pushing towards that eventual critical mass that moves us out of estrangement — from our world, from our environments, from one another — and even ourselves and towards the reality that has always been there, one that is deeply interwoven.
Image by Anders Floorfrom Pixabay
Mushrooms blooming in the woods
This is the sensuality that I ask you to explore. As your senses awaken from a long winter, take a moment to feel the sunlight on your skin. Take a walk or get out of your house and feel present in your body, embracing all of its perfect imperfections. Smell the air and feel the thrum of life’s energy all around you. It is ever-present, a state of the universe and you’re encountering it right this instant.
Engaging with the sensual includes all that it implies. Your body is capable of incredible endurance, incredible pleasure and incredible pain and each of these are manifest, to greater or lesser degrees and frequently at the same time. Knowing that you have within you such depths of experience is enormously empowering.
Taurus makes numerous appearances across my chart, and my personal desire is to engage with the sensuous in its more pleasurable forms. I’m much more inclined towards the ancient Athenian festival of Anthesteria, in honor of Dionysus, a spring celebration of maturing wine than I am any sort of Spartan pain endurance but to each their own.
Becoming embodied, recalling our bodies, is the important part. Estrangement from the self has been the theme of this era and losing that connection has cost quite a lot. We are encouraged to see our bodies as near-machines rather than the constantly morphing, fluidly changing symbiotic organisms that we are. Your body crackles with electricity, surges with water from every part of the globe, rings out into the wild world beyond.
Now is a wild time of birthing, of seething creative energy and ecstasy. Ride this rhythm and recall the body.
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