The slow emergence of spring

(and the even slower emergence of a writing purpose)

The latter part of this long, wet winter has taken its toll on my usual enthusiasm for life, as I know it has for many of us in the UK. One of the ways I have dealt with this particularly challenging season has been to establish a daily writing habit that I’ve charted here on Substack. Indeed, it has become a priority over the course of these dark months and I am happy with the practice I have maintained. But a deeper question has prowled beneath this practice, one which sits at the heart of many non-professional writers’ practices: and that is, quite simply, what is the point? What purpose does my writing serve? Where is it going? Why is it important to continue? Spring has been painfully slow to emerge this year (or so it feels), but perhaps even more painful has been the stubborn reluctance of a rationale for my writing to emerge too. Let me take you through the early spring days of the past month and my journey towards purpose.

March 19

One of the good days. Mist creeps into the valley, soaking our houses, the road, the trees. All dripping. This winter has been dismal. Wetness has sunk into my bones and my writing has barely clung to the branches. Two writers share on Substack their recent rejections, even after publishing their books. Writing is hard, competitive. Perhaps it's OK if I don't write a book soon, or in my 50s even. I read a Guardian article about people who achieve great things in their 90s - like PhDs, writing books and coming out. It's never too late. Thin tips of buds on the trees, yellow daffodils crowd the low ground. Verges wear celandine and primroses like pale yellow buttons.

March 21

Spring equinox. For the second or third today running, I have awoken in the not-entire dark, sensing the morning edge into my consciousness. In moments, when I open my eyes again, there is thin white-blue light behind the blinds. In a moment more, the light has spread, and I listen for the first song of morning. Then he starts, a loud insistent, urging kind of song. I suspect it is Song Thrush and this morning I creep out of bed to find out. The extraordinary Merlin Bird ID app affirms my identification. Song Thrush is joined quickly by Blackbird atop the dying ash tree, Wren close to the edge of the house, and Robin in the hawthorn across the road. But, oh, I am not prepared for the noise! The shout of it, the orchestra of sound.

March 22

The magnolia is out. It is almost fifteen years since our wedding morning, when my parents’ tree was full of flower in Torquay. Now the trees, even up here near the moor, have been in flower a full month earlier. The world feels disorientated, unsure of its direction. If we can't count on the flowers coming out in the springtime, what can we count on? Sometimes, I feel dizzy, dislocated, like I’m being spun around and unable to strike focus.

I am watching Dickinson on Apple TV, a quirky postmodern tale of the poet Emily Dickinson and her life in Amherst. In a run of several episodes, we watch her conflicting thoughts about having work published. She wants to be published and court the fame that goes along with it, but then she is plunged into doubt about the ramifications of having her work in print for the world to see. She is terrified of the exposure. I know it is a fictionalised account but her work was largely unpublished before she died and the series explores one interpretation for why that might have been. I recognise myself in her deliberations. I admit to feeling ambiguous about being published, too. There is an awful lot of striving that must go with it, and I wonder if I have the stomach for it. Or perhaps I'm just tired today after a busy week packed to the edges with work and other things that matter.

The wind murmurs the magnolia tree, and pink falls through grey sky. The ground beneath the Camellia of the East is a frothy heap of soft petals. I can feel the light pushing its way into life’s peripheral vision. I think of the Gaia installation I saw in Tewkesbury Abbey a few months back: the blue-white cloud planet hanging high above us, our tiny isles seated beyond the curve right at the top, invisible from our vantage point on the flagstones beneath. The darkness of the winter, the lightness of the summer makes sense when I see our place above the fat equator, so vast, jarring with our inflated sense of importance. The mass of the planet tells me otherwise.

I catch A Good Read on Radio Four and Christopher Ecclestone has chosen Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I read it a few years back and it reminds me that without identifying our purpose in life, we are doomed. It is a good prompt to redefine my own purpose and I scribble some thoughts down: to support and encourage others in their learning and growth - to witness and to write - to share with others so it might help them too - to speak for more-than-human others who can't speak for themselves - to love another - to participate in the cultural richness of artists, musicians, actors, writers in this beautiful, terrible world. Could that be enough?

March 23

The thing that my friends and readers comment on in my writing is the raw unedited extracts from my journal. I note down ideas from Tania Hershman’s permission to be playful and write for ourselves. Thoughts pass through me, like water through soil. I have decided to transcribe my notebooks. All my journals, four of them since 2020, are stacked by my bed, full of words. Nearly a five-year evolution of thought, writing, reading, and nature. It is time to analyse them as if I were doing a research project. What might my question be? Perhaps - how can reading, writing, and encountering nature offer us a purpose in life? I try to recall the last time I wrote something that I liked and reflect it is almost impossible to write freely about inspired by nature, whilst indoors. Some of my best writing has happened outside: in the garden, along the lane, on the coast, looking out to sea. Walls hold my thoughts in, truncate lines of flight that might otherwise soar.

March 25

Brief expanding sunshine.

March 26

An other-worldly mist loiters in the valley, slowly creeping up the hill to Berra Tor. A tiny window of blue opens to the side of the church. Stillness. All rained out yesterday, it didn't stop for a moment. I have the smallest thought. I don't want to entertain it. That I will never get published. The thought is at once relieving and then deeply disappointing. To publish feels like I need something I don't have - energy, momentum, determination for longer than a couple of days. Oh, where to place my energy?

March 27

Ode to my neighbour’s magnolia. You are Julia’s tree. You ancient bereft being, spreading your limbs through the ages. Sleek petals grace the gravel path. I tread carefully between your pink tongues, dew-sparkled, refracting the leaden sky. You mark the years: weddings, deaths, standing over our tiny fleshy dilemmas, crooking your branches against the westerly winds. This space, this place, how you have cracked open my heart each year that passes. Who would I be without you? Why do I love you so? Your sister sits away down the hill, glorious and spreading, mauve and dusky rose-pink. You will linger a while longer this year perhaps because you came early, but I will miss your hefty soft seed heads, your prehistoric otherness that takes me back to other long times. You stand here still, despite us all. But how long can you cling to your life?

March 28

An extraordinary few days in weather. Yesterday, I dodged towering white-grey cloud masses with snow dumping on the moor. I walked in bright sunshine, there and back to university. Then, heavy rain all afternoon, until I could no longer bear its incessant hammering on the roof lights. It finally stopped around nine in the evening. As I was going to bed, G took my hand and said you're going to want to see this. Hedgehog, I thought, as he led me to the patio doors and flicked the outside light on to illuminate - I couldn't compute what for the briefest of moments. A white sheet covered everything, a world dark yet brilliant white, a ghost landscape speaking from a different place. Snow. It had snowed, for fuck’s sake. It was still snowing, streaks of soft white-grey falling from a black sky, out of nowhere it seemed, beyond the arc of light. An inch, two inches. The sudden absence of noise made sense now, the heavy rainfall had transformed into heavy snow.

This morning it lingers on the edges of the road and in small clumps around the plants, but the rain continues. Then, gusts of wind. Torrential rain, in wave after wave, bamboo tossing itself loose. Then bright sunshine, blue sky, and a noticeable warming. Ah, it's finally passed we think. Then the skies darken again, distant thunder, one flash of lightning. This feels like the end. What if this is the day the Atlantic current decides it's time to switch off? What if it never stops raining? It has been almost three long months of rain, with no respite in sight. I don't want to be cosy anymore. I want out of here. The sun light flashes across the far fields, layers of green ascend the hillside to the old fort. Soon those brown smudges of trees will be seamlessly green, and the transformation to spring will be complete. But not yet, we must wait a while longer. Another white cloud heaps on the horizon, its white tips sharp against the blue beyond.

March 29

Seven rooks on the deck, each coming and going, jumping and twitching. The day dawns bright, baby blue sky, washed clean from the storm yesterday. All is still now, quiet. A time to pause, breathe in the fresh air, ponder what's next. It's Good Friday. I wonder if it'll last, this fine spell, long enough to rest our wet bones in sunlight. I need it badly at the moment. Later: another dramatic day, enormous rainclouds, bright and warm sunshine in between. Weathering (by dear Ruth Allen) arrived yesterday and I cannot wait to read it.

April 2

A still morning. The flag on the church, recently so active and energetic in its jaunty right-angles, is now still as the stone turrets that circle it. Blue sky, mist cloaks the far hill, each tree distinct in its flow. The garden is a painting, not a waver of a branch or a flicker of a leaf. The only movement is the slow accretion of cloud, likely bringing the rain that is forecast later in the morning. A wood pigeon strafes across the valley to the church, a black-and-blue flash of magpie sweeps up to the roof, one, two rooks track lazily across the sky. The morning is incongruent, uncertain, the stillness such a contrast to the preceding weeks and months. This is spring, it announces, and we have all forgotten what to do.

April 3

It is still in the garden, but the flag betrays the stiff westerly breeze coursing across the valley. The three azalea bushes are flowering deep red, fuchsia pink. It is my imagination, but the garden feels a little neater and clearer after our Easter efforts, brambles pulled and burnt, wildness tamed a fraction. Still wet from long hours of drizzle yesterday.

April 4

In Weathering, I read: “at almost every conceivable level of our imagining, it is impossible to create a change without a discontinuity, without a moment of not knowing who we are, or what we are going to become. Rupture precedes revolution.” I wonder if my inner struggles are a question of identity, that I'm not entirely certain who I am. When I think of my writing, research, exploration, geography, place, teaching even, it feels like a solid sense of identity. I know this in my bones. But then I go and think it's not enough, compare myself with others who have done far more. There is part of me that longs to have been the best at something, the extrovert side that wanted a life in the theatre or as an artist, the sporty side that wanted to be dancer or a long-distance hiker. Or someone who organised refugee camps or gave her life in service, doing something for the collective good. It is hard for me to locate my container, my good enough, my self-sufficiency. I seek more acceptance that I am doing exactly what I should be doing, on balance, based on all that I have done before. I make some plans and set goals for my writing.

April 5

I feel lighter (with the lighter nights) and more purposeful in my morning writing hour: compiling notes and thoughts from my notebooks. A story will emerge. Azaleas are out. Misty. Heavy rain. Weak bird song. When will it dry out?

April 9

The storm played long through the night, sending loose objects flying. This morning, after a night spent with blustery intrusions into my consciousness, Yew and Bamboo are still being thrown around, whilst the painted foreground of azaleas stand still and solid. They have reached an intensity that seems to be unsurpassable each day, yet each day it deepens. Crimson, cerise, lime green. It feels as if nothing else is changing, day on day, as if spring is stalled. Perhaps it is the after-effects of El Niño, unsettling our patterns, such that are left. I hear on Radio Devon that, by the end of March, 1.4 metres of Dartmoor’s annual 2 metre rainfall had already fallen. I haven't imagined it. Three months, since Christmas, of heavy blotting rain, sweeping all before it on our lanes and ditches.

What am I learning? That resistance to life's process is futile, pointless, harmful even. The moment I heard it was an El Niño year, I grudgingly accepted my destiny. It is a wet year. That's alright, there will be other years, perhaps spent in other dry places. We are all in it together, all affected, all have felt the relentless onslaught of the elements, all have felt small in comparison. Acceptance is always the end of suffering. The moment I exhale into the fact, my shoulders drop, belly softens, I sense that glorious moment of rightness: I am exactly where I should be, need to be. I'm in the thick of life, right here, noticing, witnessing, writing, creating lines of words out of spin drift.

April 11

A soft, close, mist-enveloped evening and morning. The church fades to the faintest imprint onto the ash-white sky. The air seeps moisture. Bright azaleas light in the foreground. I feel it now: spring is not an event, a completion I am waiting for. It is a slow emergence, happening everywhere, all the time, and the moments when I'm outside, I observe it as small leaps forward. Last night, G and I went for a walk into the mizzle, past hedgerows peaking green, wild garlic now lush-leaved, cleavers a few inches tall now, nettles small but spreading, a few brown sycamore leaves opening, celandines sleepy and half-closed yellow specs. One fearless bluebell. Moss trousers on the severed hedge-top trees. The church vanishes in the mist. At our writing group online, I hear myself speak of a rising excitement, a returning enthusiasm for my writing. Something has awakened.

April 13

Yesterday, we had perhaps our first fully present spring day. Birds loud and blossom popping from the pear tree, nettles and lamium spreading on our semi-wild patch at the front. I did some tidying of the garden. The great surge of growth is coming.

~

As a social scientist by training, I look for patterns and correlations and it should come as no surprise that as spring emerged, so did my inspiration and belief in the purpose of writing. And yet, it did surprise me. Perhaps next year I can enter the damp dark season more prepared than I have been this year. Perhaps I need to accept that whilst I am now a daily writer, I am only a seasonally purposeful one. I wonder.

For the writers amongst you, do you recognise this struggle for purpose? What are your strategies for keeping writing? What helps? Have you noticed a seasonality to your writing practice? For those of you who aren’t writers, how have you kept meaning and purpose close in your life these recent wet months? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below (in the app, the most optimal way to view my posts).