spring on the wind

a reflection on hibernation

I write this to you sitting in the living room of my childhood, the centuries-old floorboards creaking gently as the ground shifts. It’s imperceptible almost all the time in the houses built more recently, insulated from the change in the seasons, but here? No, here we sense the change on the wind in the sighs of the house, the stretch of the wood. We know the spring is coming because the house knows. It whispers to us, things will keep changing, keep going, keep living.

I was asked by an old friend this weekend if I was writing anything these days. I at first felt like I should say no - I have been dormant here, deep underground. Does that mean I’m not writing?

The blue of the sky here is not the blue of Texas. Here it is a brighter, colder blue. It feels raw, pressing against the black shadows of the trees. When you inhale, it goes farther down your lungs, traveling its raw, rich blue right into your veins. Here the blues of the world are indexed to sky and ocean, river and salt marsh. Here the blue comes back into my body and fills me - not with inspiration, exactly, not with words, exactly -

with thin, reedy clarity. Do not be afraid to take your time.

We think our lives are linear, we think we travel in a straight line. We think we run out of chances because we cannot repeat the singular year, the singular day, the moments that have thus far marked us.

But everywhere I go the world says no. No, Hilary, you are in the circle.

You are in the circle of the seasons. You are in the circle of the church year. You are in the 18 meter circle of the canter, the trot, the softening, there, there, there. No turn of the circle is the same, but we are fooling ourselves if we think we never return to places we have been or selves we once were.

This raw, pressing blue is breathed back into my veins, as it was twenty years ago in my teenage spring break mornings worrying about popularity. This raw, ocean blue is sprayed against my face, as it was ten years ago when I stood before the edge of the land and wondered how I could ever become a mother, and it sprays again now, as I have become and keep becoming that mother. Here the wind sighs through the house, and it is not the same wind, and I am not the same Hilary -

but it is still the wind, and I am still Hilary. And you are still you, gloriously and wonderfully yourself and all the past and future spiralling through the blues of the skies and the rustles of the leaves. We are still on the circle, we can take our time.

If I cannot write a book or the pieces of one this spring, then when the circle turns, I can ask again. If I cannot capture for you the edge of the world that is where sky and land and ocean meet, the next time I stand before it I will try to tell you again. If I hibernate now, I will awaken soon. The circle will turn, and I with it.

The turn is coming, from deep within the waiting earth, from the hidden wisdom of this old house, stretching wood and beams and brick. It will bring newness, and familiarity, the familiar and the unexpected.

We can take our time to greet it. We can greet ourselves -

new, and beloved, all at once.