#4 spring shadows & other intimacies

in which beauty and grief unfold in the same breath

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.

So begins Edna St Vincent Millay’s poem Spring, which confronts the dark shadow of the cheerful season in a world still wounded from all that it has lost.

As spring begins, all I can think about are shadows. The shadows in the world and the shadows inside myself the world is revealing to me.

I am morphed, refracted, overtaken by these shadows and I fail to see a way of escaping them, nor accepting them.

I am at a halt. So I read poetry in search of movement.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know, Edna writes. And I hold my breath, filling in the gaps of everything I have known this year.

Grief. Death. Beauty. Failure. Hope. Heartache.

Rebirth.
Always, rebirth.

Spring’s trick appearances make it unbearable to witness alongside all that Edna knows to be true.

It is apparent that there is no death. But what is apparent is revealed as an illusion. The truth is twofold, the smell of the earth is good and under ground are the brains of men eaten by maggots.

In the face of this horror, the leaves opening stickily, the spikes of the crocus, the smell of the earth, none of it seems quite good enough.

And April in this poem makes no attempt to reconcile us but, instead, comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

I look up from the page and see the flaming petals of the Gohanameyya tree in the garden shedding everywhere on ground, half dried and still stuck to their shadows, which stretch out long in the opposite direction of the light.

garden shadows

The next day, Ada Limón’s Instructions on Not Giving Up finds its way to me in a workshop. Another poet reflecting on spring’s obscenity.

A shock of white and taffy, bobbles and trinkets, candy-coloured blossoms, and fuchsia funnels, overwhelm the poem.

Ada, too, is overwhelmed by this confetti of aftermath, an untimely celebration too soon after whatever winter did to us…

The mess, the hurt, the empty.

Her words stir me up as she looks to the greening leaves for patience, for healing. I try to do the same.

Find the felt sense of acceptance that a tree seems to enact in every new slick leaf, unfurling like a fist to an open palm, as if to say: Fine then, I’ll take it. I’ll take it all.

After the workshop, I ask myself, how much more can I take? Why does this spring reek of death? And when is the funeral service? Who will pay for it?

I wonder if it has ever been any different, or if the shadow has always been here and is only just appearing to me, asking to be seen, revealing the shape of the world’s reality.

I try to hold multiple truths at once, the beauty and the grief. The pain, and the relief.

I try to love the shadows I see everywhere around me, which are not simple opposites but composites. Deepening and enriching the truth of their objects. Transforming their shapes. Flattening and stretching them, connecting them to their landscapes in new and novel ways.

Alice Oswald calls her shadow scissors thrown at me by the light.

This is my favourite description I’ve found so far.

I take out my own scissors to cut open the world as I knew it once and make it my task to sort through the pieces, to create a new image, to make confetti of the aftermath. §

This week, I invite you to get to know your own shadow. Draw it, sit beside it, watch it morph and change with the light. Play if you can with the darkness, don’t shy away. And let me know what happens.

Thank you for reading & other intimacies, a weekly letter in which I tell a story about the nonhuman world and how to deepen our relationship to it.

If you enjoyed this essay, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with someone you think might enjoy it as well.

Thank you so much, and I hope you have a wonderful week.

Take care xo

Mai

Poems mentioned:

Spring by Edna St Vincent Mallay

Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limón

Shadow by Alice Oswald