Spring Equinox is upon us and in this last year of the second decade of this uneasy millennium, she brings with her an extra-bright nightlight in the form of the super worm moon to help illuminate our way this season.

It’s been 19 years since the earth and moon last aligned in such a way on this day. 19 years ago, I was oblivious to the Vernal Equinox and the moon’s movements. I was doing all I could to catch sleep. I was parenting a five-month old, potty training and chasing a toddler, and stuffing the demands of hotel sales work into my schedule where and when I could. If Spring Equinox was a heralding of balance and equilibrium that year, I had not received the memo.

Two decades later and I have the promise of a kind of redux. Alas, life couldn’t be more different. I still feel out of whack and misaligned, but for entirely different reasons. No longer do I have kids to chase except via text. No longer must I hide in bedroom closets and mimic the motions of air traffic controllers in order to make work phone calls.

A fresh new season is here yet it’s not one that sings to me of rebirth, renewal, flowers, and butterflies….not just yet anyways.

This year, I shall celebrate the warmth of the rare 75 degree temperature day promised to us here in Seattle by seeking out the worn pathway of the local labyrinth, with its time-honored design that has contemplatives like me meandering inwards to the still point at our core, before returning back out into the world, ideally with a greater sense of reclamation.

And I will also find (aka lose) myself seeking out a nearby creek and its muddy embankment in order to sink my toes into the soft earth. What I most seek at this winter/spring threshold where the last patches of snow have only just finally melted, is a kind of rootedness and connection to the earth. I want to mold my feet into the cold, wet clay so that I might know stillness and a somatic sense that the resilient ground will hold me. I yearn to feel the messiness of such a foot bath that I might better appreciate the healing elixir of a cleansing food scrub thereafter.

Release. Renew. So much of what I want to let go of I will bequeath to the mud. Sorrow, uncertainty, shame, confusion, inertia. Let these be mud concerns now.

Spring has sprung which means it’s time for me to make a ceremony with my feet…which is to say, shed my shoes, wiggle my toes as worms know to do with their whole shimmering selves, and dare to stand upon the holy ground of a brand-new season in life.

MUD SEASON } by May Sarton
In early spring, so much like a late autumn,
Gray stubble and the empty trees,
We must contend with an unwieldy earth.
In this rebirth that feels so much like dying,
When the bare patches bleed into raw mud,
In rain, in coarsening ooze, we have grown sluggard,
Cold to the marrow with spring’s nonarrival:
To hold what we must hold is iron-hard,
And strength is needed for the mere survival.
By dogged labor we must learn to life
Ourselves and bring a season in;
No one has ever called child-bearing easy,
And this spring-bearing also asks endurance.
We are strained hard within our own becoming,
Forced to learn ways how to renew, restore.
Though we were dazzled once by perfect snow,
What we have not has made us what we are.
Those surface consolations have to go.
In early spring, so much a fall of will,
We struggle through muds of unreason,
We dig deep into caring and contention;
The cold unwieldly earth resists the spade.
But we contend to bring a difficult birth
Out from the lack of talent, partial scope,
And every failure of imagination,
Science and art and love still be our hope!
What we are not drives us to consummation.”