A Grief Spell for the Spring Equinox

Breaking Open, Making Kin, & Making Trouble

blossoms on our potted lemon tree!

Dear Shapeshifters,

The first blossoms on our potted lemon tree opened last week, revealing bright white petals, dusted with purple and bursting with yellow anthers and stamens.  

I had been convinced that the tree was dying as they sat in our less-than-ideally lit dining room all Winter, clearly unimpressed with the grow light I had bought. 

So, when strange white bulbs began growing all over the skinny green and leafless branches a few weeks ago, I found myself squealing and gesturing wildly at my roommates, suddenly spilling over with joy at the miracle of them.

When Spring comes, it can truly feel miraculous.

No wonder countless traditions story Spring as a resurrection.

The world around us appears to be doing the impossible: these first blossoms of spring, these birdsong filled mornings, the sun on the porch, even our own desire, social and creative energies suddenly, sometimes gushingly, returning. 

Amidst Spring’s exuberance, it can be easy to feel like our grief and sadness are at odds with the greening world. The contrast of Spring with the horrors of ongoing genocides and state violence is stark. We want the miracle of springtime for our kin in Gaza and black and neurodivergent children like Ryan Gainer. We want the morning birds and the lemon blossoms and the children marveling at the returning green.

What place does our grief have, here, amidst the festive miracle of spring? What place does exuberance have, in these genocidal, police state hellscapes?  

I think Spring invites us to remember that joy is always a resurrection.

Alaa Miqdad, a clown of Gaza known as Uncle Aloush, shares:

“Despite the pain, we will find joy. Despite the sadness, we will find joy. I have a lot of pain, but I make the children happy… I tell everyone who wants to make children happy… Support every person you love. Give them hope to live... We will rejoice, sing, live, thrive, and rebuild.”

A daffodil heavy with rain in our front yard

Grief as a Bringer of Spring and Joy 

Old stories tell us that grief not only has a place in Spring, but that grief BRINGS the Spring. They tell us that Spring is not just soft and stunning, but mighty and fierce, and only arrives through great risk, loss, and interspecies collaboration. As Sophie Strand shares, “becoming new is never safe.”

All around us, brave and brilliant beings are breaking open, and falling apart. Seeds are breaking through soil, making their way up through the cracks, buds and new growth split through stems and bark, tight buds overflow themselves to reveal soft, exuberant faces.

The daffodils in our front yard are heavy with spring rain, bowing their faces and pressing their chests to the soil. Bayo Akomolafe reminds us, “Grieving is how flowers bloom.” 

And yet flowers and Spring seem to speak to us of deep joy and play, often mirrored in festive traditions held at the arrival of Spring throughout the world, like the Indian festival of Holi, the Jewish Purim, and the Iranian Nowruz.

If Winter landscapes hold an affirming mirror to our grief and the fertility of stillness and darkness, perhaps Spring reminds us that joy and grief, stillness and movement, risk and nourishment, light and dark, are entangled with one another. 

If Winter speaks of honoring natural limits, perhaps Spring speaks of the role of resurgence, of reaching and being with breaking points, and reaching through them, of joy as “the growth of [our] capacity to do and feel new things” (Berman and Montgomery, Joyful Militancy)

If Winter tells us there is a place for rest, then perhaps Spring tells us there is also a place for our restlessness and our “enough is enough”-ness.

Yes, Spring says, things must change. 

And the Spring winds say it loudly.

Wind as a Troublemaker of Spring

The other night, I was spooked by the wind howling through the holler as I walked down the puddled, muddy road to my partner’s house. I had the eerie feeling of being watched, and I picked up my pace, eager to get inside. 

I’m thinking about winds as the monsters and troublemakers of Spring, and thinking about trouble the way Donna Haraway talks about them:

“Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response...The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” (Staying with the Trouble)

Like all good monsters and troublemakers, winds shapeshift and unsettle, mix and stir things up, surround us and escape us. Though we can feel and hear and even ride the wind, we cannot contain, hold, or grasp them. They are both highly changeable and move in cycles we can become familiar with. But even when they arrive as expected, like the winds of Spring, they chill us and disrupt our plans, keeping us from getting too comfortable in our eagerness for the ease of warmer days.

And wind, again, like all good trouble, is essential for our ecosystems, carrying moisture, clouds, rain, pollen, spores, nutrients, the countless birds, insects, spiders, and seeds who ride their streams for transportation. 

Wind also mixes that which we might hope to contain and isolate “elsewhere”, carrying deadly storms, toxins, pollution, smoke, and fire across empire's desperate borders, walls, and property lines, which I imagine the winds laugh at. They remind us that our worlds and lives have always been permeable and entangled, that “what we do to the mountain, we do to ourselves” (Klee and Princess Benally). 

I’m thinking about Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist who was murdered by Israel in Rafah, Gaza on March 16th, 2003, at the age of 23, while blocking a bulldozer from destroying a Palestinian family’s home, a family she had known and stayed with. I’m thinking about how Rachel’s father shared in an interview that he has a strong image of Rachel as a child, twirling in the wind in a field of flowers, and how at 10 years old, Rachel was already making trouble with her refusal to separate herself from what happened to other children around the world, and shared at a children’s press conference in 1989:

“They dream our dreams. We dream theirs. We have got to understand that they are us, we are them.” 

Tower and Anemone inspired collage, by me

Inspiration for Spring Troublemakers: The Wind Flower and The Tower Card 

This Spring Equinox, I’m thinking about the medicine of Anemone, or Pulsatilla, also known as the Wind Flower, who is known to bloom during the earliest, windiest parts of Spring.

Anemone is associated with both fragility and resilience for their endurance of harsh conditions, and is both poison and medicine, reminding us of the old adage, “the dose makes  the poison”, and of the power of smallness. 

Anemone is one of the most powerful, fast acting, relaxing nervines I have ever worked with, and is especially helpful in the throes and whirlwinds of trauma and acute grief, panic attacks, overwhelming anxiety, and insomnia. 

Often said to grow where blood has been spilt in old battlefields in Europe, Anemone is a flower growing out of grief, tears, death, ruins. 

In some rural areas in Europe, it is said that fairies would nestle within the Anemone flower for protection, as the flowers close their petals and droop their heads in anticipation of rain and during the night (Grieve).

Anemone invites us to soften towards the changes being asked of us, to loosen the tension we hold in our bodies by allowing ourselves to meet and ride waves of grief and change as they come, rather than guarding and bracing ourselves against them. Anemone invites us to stop trying to hold it all on our own, and remember to allow ourselves to be held by others.

In the Dirt Gems oracle deck, Chelsea Granger & Anne Louise Burdett refer to Anemone as “the wind rider”, and share:

“Anemone is a loosener of the often strongly held self-preservation patterns in our thinking; the habits in our body that live in preparation for the next disaster, or the belief that doom is inevitable. Yes, disasters will come some days, but living in a state of hypervigilance will overburden the systems we need in order to survive…”

Together, Anemone and the Tower card in Tarot tell a story about how we meet disaster on the days when it comes. 

The Tower tells a story about meeting our limits, losing, failing, cracking, and collapsing as a sacred experience from which life springs. The cards’ image, always evolving, is often depicting something like this: a tower cracked almost clean in half, struck by lightning, in flames, while a figure or two are seen springing or falling from the tower back to the earth. 

We can recognize these figures as seeds, as Kim Wayman shared with me, like the Anemone, whose seeds ride the winds and collaborate with the rains to “literally bury themselves” (Candeias). 

The Tower card and anemone teach us about being destroyed by massive change, and allowing ourselves to be moved and changed by the trickstery power of grief.  They offer us stories about planting ourselves as seeds, reaching through ourselves and towards life from within ruins, to

“make room… for the spirits of the fault line, the new gods that scream through the cracks with the first musical notes of worlds to come.” (Bayo Akomolafe)

A Spell for Breaking Open: In Praise of New Gods

When the Spring winds blow,

May we ride them back to each other,

Back to the earth,

Back to the ocean,

Back to our fault lines,

Where all possibilities spring.

May we trust that we can’t know

What we are capable of 

By only bracing ourselves

and turning away from our pain.

May we trust our capacity

To turn towards what’s broken

And as the cracks grow

In who we thought we were

And what we thought was impossible,

May we water them

And allow ourselves to become new.

Yours,

Mara June 

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