Hemingway wrote that a spring day could only be spoiled by people. He was right. A good spring day is clear and optimistic; if you haven’t seen one this year, I know you will soon. Spring needs little else - it’s a welcome respite from winter and allows us to prepare for the long days to come. We have now given up on our resolutions and reconciled ourselves as the flawed beings we were meant to be.
Yet, somehow, we remain optimistic. We renew our vows to stop scowling at children and resist our urges to mock others openly. We go outside again. The serotonin from sunlight helps us shake off the depression most rational people feel in winter. We connect with nature again—not in the way of some dirty hippy or a crunchy hiker but in the subtle way of nature that surprises us even though it always returns. I may park my vehicle in the same place today, but there is a bloom on the tree that wasn’t there the day before. Or perhaps I hadn’t noticed it. We continue in our days, moving through them, but the corners we navigate have grown softer, and the roads a little brighter.
Spring does not shout or beg to be cataloged or curated. It arrives without warning, and you never know how long it will last, only that it will be gone sooner than you think. Spring is your house guest with whom you want to stay longer. It offers us nature’s best advice—just be.
Billy Mitchell is a fishing guide, an English lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and a brilliant writer on nature. In this older piece, he writes, “This is spring. This is the beginning of something.”
https://sevenstripesfishing.com/2019/03/05/this-is-spring/
Japan has a fairytale forest with trees that have lived for 7,000 years. While I may never visit, I found comfort in reading about these trees that have outlasted empires.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yakushima-island-hikes-japan
E. M. Forster wrote A Room with a View in 1908. It chronicles Lucy Honeychurch’s travels to magnificent Florence. You could find worse things to read on a spring day.