I’m having one of those moods where I’m in a mood. You know? I’ve been lying around in bed, eating Cheetos and watching old Catherine Cookson mini-series on BritBox. It’s a grey day, chilly, and overcast. The wind is squealing into the cracks and crevices of our old house. Mother Nature is in that liminal space between winter and spring.
Did you ever read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte? It’s the greatest gothic love story ever told. The dreary, drafty, half-lit cavern of a stone house. Ghosts rapping at nighttime windows. The moody moors windswept and wild where Catherine and the foundling Heathcliff share in an anguished love that will never come to fruition. Ugh. So good! My heart pounds with a delicious angst, the cruelty of a love unfulfilled so close to the bone. Real life. Real feelings. Real human.
I’ve also been held rapt by Charlotte Gray’s biography of Susannah Moodie and her sister, Catherine Parr Traill. Two women (and their husbands) who emigrated to the backwoods of Upper Canada from England in the 1830s. Acres and acres of dense forests, swarms of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, ravenous packs of wolves, snow up to your eyeballs, diseases pre-vaccinations, and not a single settler survival skill among them. And yet, they managed.
What I might be getting at is a longing for a life rich in real experiences, one that has me grounded in nature, and buoyed by loving and valued relationships. One that reminds me that small is okay, that in the moment is where the magic lies.
I love a violent thunderstorm replete with retina burning flashes of lightning, bowling ball thunderclaps that cause me to jump, and torrents of rain. Throw in a whipping wind and I’m in heaven. When common sense tells me to stay indoors, my instincts take me outside - to be a part of it, to feel the wet and the cold on my face, to experience the deafening sounds of the pounding rain, to sway and swoon with the trees.
Those are the moments I feel really alive, in my body, on this planet. Those are the moments when gratitude for life comes so instinctively, so completely. Mother Nature is the company I choose to keep. I know human beings are social animals - we need connection and a sense of belonging in order to thrive but, I wonder, does that have to mean connection to other human beings? Can it mean, instead or primarily, an affinity with families of trees?
Is it possible that the excitement of new life in spring comes not just from signalling the end of a long, cold winter but that a reunion with old/new friends is close at hand? When spring brings back bird song in the morning, shoots of daffodils and tulips wherever the squirrels had left them, buds on the trees, and brown grasses turning to green, it feels like my community is returning to me. I recognize then how lonely and isolating the winter months were without the silent chatter of new and renewed life.
It’s soon time to walk through the gardens, the forests and fields and welcome back those in which I take comfort, those whose presence is uplifting, easeful, and timeless.
Welcome back my friends!
Your words brought joy to my soul. ❤️