how to lean into spring birthing

Have you noticed your body’s early spring nudges? Perhaps you’re waking a bit earlier. Maybe your appetite is shifting or you are noticing cravings that haven’t visited all winter. Our bodies are deeply connected to the world around us and even the most city bound of us can feel these seasonal shifts. 

Here in Durham, the birds are waking early with their morning dialogue, rich and loud, a collective song that speaks of connection and progenesis. The bees are back which always fills me with such delight. I must have been a strong, fat carpenter bee in a former life–the low buzz of their wings sends a deep soothing frequency to my spirit—the smell of sawdust lingers in cosmic memory as a message of home.

Early spring brings awakening, the energy that has been quietly gathering beneath the soil, within our unconscious, among the stars, finds itself again at the start of something new. We begin the metamorphosis– a new version of ourselves, when the trees bud and the rivers begin to swell again and for me this is the true New Year.  Spring equinox marches closer and this recent full moon asks for a shedding of old stories in a way I did not see coming. 

Metamorphosis, transformation, change–all language that can keep us from remembering that birth is always labor. True change requires reckoning and reckoning often brings pain. I could feel pain surfacing for me these past few weeks–I avoided it by riding the seductive twin waves of TikToks and insomnia. Yet, she finds me still, in the late hours, while I’m brushing my teeth, looking directly at me through the mirror at the yoga studio. 

The beautiful thing about spring is that the pain of birthing is collective. We need not hold it alone. The way through is evident in the bursting forth of fruit and vegetables from the nexus of flowers, it is clearly felt in the chirping of small baby birds and the marching of ants across the terrain once again. We are a love story to be told. All we have to do is listen. Even when that story brings us sadness, fear, anger, grief, it is ours to hold. And we are holding it among acres of wisdom and foretelling. We are living it in the wake of our ancestors and in the blossoming of our descendents. 

So we practice birthing. I bring my pain to therapy. I bring it to my bath water filled to the brim with salt, lavender, and flowers. I bring it to my loved ones and ask them to hold me as I quake with tremors of the past and celebrate with them when I have retrieved what has been lost.  I do not run from the beautiful, handsome children within me who just want to be seen. To be loved. To be held. 

We are an unfolding. We are the way forward and we birth ourselves anew as the light grows long and the earth bursts forth with beauty. What will be unearthed within you?