Pleasures of… Spring

Once a quarter, we invite a different writer to share their most favourite and pleasurable moments of the season.

Today, Kerri ní Dochartaigh delights in Spring’s cracking open.

It starts with a gentle cracking open, so soft and quiet you could be mistaken for thinking you had imagined it. This cracking open happens, like all good and beautiful things, slowly: bit by tender bit.

It begins in the way of all potent beginnings: with a small, delicate seed.

It begins in the way of all sacred beginnings: with a strange, wild story.

In spring, we give ourselves back to the earth.

In spring, we allow ourselves, once more, to trust in the potential of seed.

In spring, we allow ourselves, once more, to trust in the power of story.

And what are the seeds we sow in spring?

What are the stories we tell in spring?

The spring I gave birth to my first child was a spring unlike any other I had ever known. It was a global pandemic, and the UK and Ireland were experiencing, for the second year in a row, the kind of spring I always thought only existed in vintage children’s picture books, or in old stories handed down from elders to us young’uns as a way of keeping the magical past alive. But, no – it turns out this beautiful, bruised earth of ours still offers us those kinds of springs.

Springs that can change a life; heal a wound; create a future; leave a trace for all times.