spring

What is Saving My Spring Life 2026🌸💮🌸💮

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As Spring traipses on its merry way, there are a number of things that are making it a beautiful new season for me (besides all the colors, of course).

🌸1.) Cherry Blossom scented anything. I totally forgot to go to the local Japanese gardens for the sakura blooming, but I am fully in love with anything that smells like cherry blossoms. I love the way the clean laundry fragrances rooms when I use the Downy Light Cherry Blossom scent booster in the wash. I adore how sweet the Forever Cherry Blossom body spray and lotion from Bath & Body Works makes my skin. I am enamored of just how springy a scent it is. It is like what the color pink would smell like, and I love it!

💮2.) Cups of coffee on a lazy Saturday morning. I adore mornings where I can wake up on my own and then take my slow, sweet time with my coffee and a book while the rest of the household sleeps or hurkle-durkles. I love letting my mind rouse itself with a good story, waking up my spirt as well as my body.

🌸3.) Handwriting. I have been re-discovering some of my favorite types of pens (currently, the Uniball Air and Tombow Fudenosuke Brush Pens) and writing longhand (such as the first draft of this post). One of my colleagues took a page of notes that I had taken during a meeting and said that it was like I had written her a missive from the Civil War. 😊I love my handwriting, personally. I adore how elegant it looks, smooth and fluid, unique even, and how delicately it suits my personality. It is really rather beautiful, if I do say so myself, to see my thoughts pour out onto paper so prettily through my pen, like my own special form of art.

💮4.) Using my local library resources, primarily the Libby app for digital books and audiobooks. I am very much enjoying getting books and audiobooks through Libby and supporting the resources of our local library. I am grateful to all the amazing librarians who give of their expertise and passion to share knowledge and imagination with our communities.

I also love sharing book recommendations with friends and colleagues. We have our own little bookish community at my school, and we spent a whole late-start free-meeting time recently talking about books, sharing recommendations and (in my case) physical books, and enjoying time together. I was surprised, stunned, and delighted to see that there are indeed so many of us bookish people in our school, beyond the obvious culprits, of course. It made me very happy to put three books into the hands of colleagues that day for them to enjoy over Spring Break. I feel such joy and pride when someone enjoys my recommendations, like I did something good for their heart and mind. My first compulsive book recommendation was Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel The Night Circus. It is still a book that I try to put into as many hands as I can, always having an extra copy to lend out or give as a gift. Along with this at the top of my list are:

  • Sue Monk Kidd’s The Book of Longings
  • Evelyn Skye’s The Incredible Kindness of Paper
  • Jaysea Lynn’s For Whom the Belle Tolls
  • Hwang Bo-Reum’s Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
  • Ann Liang’s A Song to Drown Rivers
  • Lisa See’s Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
  • India Holton’s Dangerous Damsels and Love’s Academic series

I love sharing the joy of reading with others and showing them how amazing, enchanting, and soul-soothing and life-saving stories can be. It fills my soul as much as I hope it does theirs.

🌸💮🌸💮 As Spring moves forward, I am trying to concentrate on these beautiful glimmers of life and how much they fill and sustain me. I want to continue to embrace softness and gentleness while remaining strong, remembering that I–as a woman, as a person, as a being–can, and do, hold infinite worlds within me.

And so, too, do you, dear heart. 🌸💮🌸💮

When I am Forced to Rest

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At the end of the day yesterday, an email came through my inbox, informing me and the rest of the staff in our school building that, after the coming week, the local Health Department was taking the precaution of closing all the schools in the county until Easter Monday, April 13. Today, right before lunch, my 3rd-period students came barreling into my classroom, demanding to know if I had read my email. 

“They are closing school starting MONDAY!” they shrieked at me.

I shooed them and their cacophony off to lunch and sat down to read the email, which I hadn’t read because I had been busy doing other things (go figure), for myself. Indeed that is what it said. So, instead of being out of school for three weeks, including Spring Break, we would now be out of school for a month! I panicked for a moment because my eLearning lessons weren’t done. I was only 3 days into the unit I was building. 

Then I read on.

Because our state government has offered schools a waiver of up to 20 out of the required 180 instructional days during the school year, and we would be using 15 days for this closure, that was what we were going with. So there would be NO ELEARNING during this closure. No assignments or lessons would be given to students while they are out for these four weeks.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it (still cannot, honestly), so all afternoon, I would catch myself saying, “Oh, I need to work on/copy/prepare this for class next week,” and then realize that…I didn’t.

WHAT?!

It threw me time after time, as did the realization that, unless the schedule changed drastically for the end of the year, I wouldn’t have time to teach the unit I was working on before we launched into standardized testing anyway.

I can’t just stop…can I?

I can’t just sit back and set it all aside. I have assignments that need to be graded and entered, a unit that needs to be built, no matter whether I actually get to teach it this year or not, curriculum that needs revamping, AND a 1st-grader who needs a routine and cannot afford to fall behind on her academic skills, in case they do not change the testing schedule.

I can’t just stop…can I?

And yet, in the midst of all of this chaos, a thought floated through my mind. “If you do not rest when your body says it needs, you will be forced to rest when it no longer can.”  Now, I am under zero illusions that all of this has come about because I was not taking the best care of myself. However, the truth indeed is that I have not been resting lately, dear ones. With all the grading for the end of the 3rd nine weeks, I have been working pretty much constantly and only averaging between four and five hours of a sleep a night. Not good at all. 

But I can’t just stop. Can I?

Perhaps now, in more ways than one, yes, I can stop. Perhaps I am being forced to rest. To take in the small moments. Take life day by day and create a new routine. Take the opportunity to slow down.

So, as we enter this time of admitted uncertainty, I want to see the lessons of rest that might be hiding in the corners, waiting for me to calm down enough to see and embrace them. Lessons in how to be good to myself, good to my dear ones, and what lessons and moments of quiet, rest, and hygge await me as spring peeks around the doorjamb.

Five Minutes in the Frost

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Earlier this week, in listening to her The Next Right Thing podcast, I took Emily P. Freeman’s admonition to give myself just five quiet minutes to heart. So, this morning, as I took out the trash, I gave myself five extra minutes in the frosty outside. I wandered around the front yard, looking at the flower beds that I planted back in September, with the help of my husband and father in law. I can see the shoots of my flowers–daffodils and crocuses–pushing up through the mulch in defiance of the cold, and I find myself growing more and more excited every day. I’m ready to see their colors burst out in vibrancy after a cold, bleak winter.

The sun had just come up about an hour previous, and I could see the rays and glow branching out in the sky from behind our house. The air was bright and “clear and cold and so clean it almost sparkled” (S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders), and birdsong filled the new morning. It felt as though the birds were rabid to make up for those frozen silent weeks of the winter when the icy cold stole all sound and wrapped the world in a thick quiet. Later on in the day, as I left the house for errands, I noted the same flower shoots looking even perkier in the now fully-bright and warm sunlight.

Spring is coming, I can feel my heart sing. The sun, the light, the warmth, and the color are returning, and I honestly cannot wait. After a busy, hectic, stressful week, those five minutes did me a world of good.

 

Moments in Magical Modernity: XIII

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XIII.

             When the winter snows have melted away, the trees warm and bud as their lifeblood begins to flow once more. The world begins to awaken. Not only awaken but also rejoice. Spring is springing, life is budding and blossoming, and warmth is returning to the world with Persephone’s ascent.

April is the month of preparation and May the month of revel, of celebration. The budding trees are festooned and beribboned in preparation for Beltane or May Day. There is food, music, dancing, and merriment. Persephone petitions her mother Demeter’s joy for a picturesque day on Beltane, to allow creatures and humans alike to who have been caged and sequestered for the whole of winter to frolic and enjoy freedom once more. And because she can deny her dearest daughter nothing, Demeter, along with the Lady Ostara (whom Persephone calls ‘Aunt’), will fashion the most beautiful day, the one which every spring day that comes after will strive to emulate.

Sunshine to warm. Breezes to cool. A bright blue sky to dazzle. Daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips in colors to delight and amaze. Birdsong to soothe. Soft new grass for children to run in, their feet free from restraint or encasement and their laughter inciting Joy. Yes, the most beautiful day imaginable.

 

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Image by Paper Boat Creative/Digital Vision/Getty Images, as utilized in Patti Wigington’s “Deities of the Spring Equinox”. https://www.thoughtco.com/deities-of-the-spring-equinox-2562454 

 

The Truth on Earth, Not in the Air

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It’s April and it smells like Christmas outside. It’s that cold, shimmering scent, one that promises things to come. I suppose, in that sense, Christmas and spring are similar in nature. Almost like the world is holding its breath, waiting for something. The air is cold and crisp, too much so for April for my tastes, but this is Indiana, after all. The grass is green, the trees are starting to shed their buds and press forth with leaves, albeit reluctantly, and so nature assures us of what the weather would belie:

Winter is done.

Spring is coming.

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