Secret Garden Time of Year
Why most magic is made in the dark
Exciting news, Friends! I am feeling so much gratitude to be one of the featured poets in Trillium Moon’s upcoming Spring Zine, available for pre-order now. This is a limited run of the zine, and there are only 16 copies available, so please don’t wait if you would like one! It was such a joy to be featured in the Winter Zine, and this new edition will highlight some of my spring themed poetry from the last several years, as well as journaling prompts, spring folklore, and ideas for reflecting on the season of the earth coming to life once more. I am so thrilled that I have gotten to collaborate with Heaether, the lovely human whose heart dreamt up this seasonal zine project. If you choose to purchase a copy, I hope you love it.
This week also marks the fourth birthday of the publication of my second poetry collection, Wild Unfolding, which you can find this month on Amazon for only $6.99. This collection features the poem Granary Burying Ground, which I’ve heard from so many of you is one of your favorites (thank you!), so in celebration of my book’s birthday this week, I took a copy to the real Granary Burying Ground here in Boston, to spend some time in the place that inspired that first poem (nerd alert).
The last couple of weeks has been what I have come to lovingly call “Secret Garden” time of year, when bright green shoots and stems start to poke up through the brown soil, undeterred by the continuing cool, gray weather here in Boston. We are balanced on the thin border between dark and light, winter and spring. As such, I’ve been both experimenting with not wearing mittens every time I leave the house, and continuing to bake gingerbread using my Grandma Louise’s cookie cutter, eating a plate full of the chewy, spicy treats alongside a small pot of peppermint tea in the evenings while my curious cat comes as close as he dares, eager to learn whether gingerbread might be an acceptable addition to his dinner (it’s not).
I traipse about the neighborhood, bundled in my handmade knit scarf and headband (with this ever loved soundtrack in my ears), my breath coming out in white puffs as I scan the ground for any signs of snowdrops and crocuses, two of my favorite end-of-winter flowers. Doing this last week, I actually spy an American robin who hops along with walk with me, looking as energized as I feel by the small signs of life emerging from the earth after a dark winter. For me, discovering early signs of greenness growing from the ground, even absent of colorful petals, is a promise that although spring might feel slow to start, it’s what’s next. It’s what’s coming. It all lies ahead, unspoiled and waiting to be savored.
I adore the delicious, fizzy feeling of anticipation of joy just as much (if not more) than the arrival of joy itself, and so my heart has been absolutely full to bursting with thrills of all the warmth and gorgeous gardens to come. As a kid with a June 25th birthday, for years, my answer to the question, “What’s your favorite season?” was always a loud “SUMMER!” In the past five or six years though, I have felt a shift in my preferences. Nowadays, March has a distinct, dare I say holy, feel to it. Damp, dreary days bring rain, and along with the sogginess, doubt that the sun really will come out again.
Over time, this “Secret Garden” time of year has shifted to become less about enduring impatience to arrive at the reward of full blown spring, but instead experiencing this liminal space between winter and spring as its own satisfying time to celebrate and savor. “Secret Garden” time of year has become its own reward for me.
I’ve thought about writing about what “Secret Garden” time of year means to me for a long time, but it feels like technicolor in my body but vague and faded when written, so until now, I’ve avoided attempting to pin it down with words on the page. When I’m grasping for words to describe what I mean, I find myself reaching for my copy of the book itself. In The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the main character Mary Lennox, first encounters the gardens on the ground of Misselthwaite Manor during the last part of an English winter. For Mary, and for the other characters in the story, it is a sacred practice to weed and plant the garden during the cold months, and their enjoyment of the garden when spring finally does arrive is all the sweeter for having done the work in the dark. Colin Craven describes this kind of seasonal energy:
“Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”
Back in January, during some of the coldest days of the winter, I found myself standing outside in the sunshine (when it did grace the Northeast), my face turned upward like a satellite, eyes closed. I noticed what the weak, low rays felt like on my skin: a flush of yellow warmth in the midst of a deep freeze. For a moment, I could begin to imagine a fraction of what it might feel like on a hot Sunday afternoon in July, tilting my face towards the sky as I walk the beach, the Atlantic foaming up over my toes. Hope shows itself like the bright green shoots coming out from hiding. Most magic is made in the dark.
This time of year also brings back treasured memories of a spring break trip I took to Ireland when I was 19 years old. I worked all summer the year before waitressing at a retirement home, saving nearly every penny I had earned to (hopefully) take my first trip to Ireland. Ireland was always a dream trip of mine, and I longed to step on soft Irish soil, imagining that I was walking in the same footsteps that my Grandma McKenna’s grandparents did before they left to come to the United States in the mid- nineteenth century. Traveling with two friends from high school, every moment of that trip exceeded my expectations and planted within me a love for travel, something I had not done much at all as a child.
The rain soaked cobblestones and colorful building facades of Dublin won my heart, and the misty green hills and shores of the countryside seeped into my skin, an invisible tattoo I still wear today. It rained nearly every day on my trip, and while I’m suspect that Ireland would be more pleasant weather wise in the summertime, I had no doubt that I was meant to be there that March, right before the calendar clicked over to spring. I was 19 years old. I was studying theatre and history at college, and I nursed plans of leaving Upstate New York and going to a big city to audition and act and be a part of the history I had only ever studied before. Despite not ever having experienced a romantic relationship, I felt a deep desire to share my life with someone whom I could share love and groundedness and freedom.
Standing atop the Blarney Castle long after my friends had gone back down, I didn’t feel out of place or running late or lonely. I didn’t live in New York City as a working actress yet, and My Person was still a mystery in my mind, but somehow the absence of these things I knew I desired did not take away from the absolute rush of life energy I felt in my very bones staring out at the soft focus Irish horizon. I had just finished acting in a highly coveted world premiere play at college. I was enjoying feeling more confident than I had in high school and had given myself permission to take on leading lady energy in my own life. I felt on the precipice of a still unknown unfolding. I couldn’t see the explosion of my dreams yet, but things were emerging from underneath the ground that I had never seen, from seeds I had planted in my heart years before. The work was already happening. Magic was already in motion. There was no destination; I had already arrived.
Nearly seven years ago now, I planted some hyacinth bulbs in the front yard of our rented apartment in Medford, Massachusetts, never guessing that a few months later, our landlord would let us know she was selling the property and we would have to look for a new place to live. Four months later, in March, we packed up all our things in boxes and drove to our new apartment a few miles away. I can remember crying many times during that time, about so many different strands of the grief that comes with leaving a place you love, not least of which was the realization that I would not get to see if the hyacinth bulbs I had planted with so much hope and anticipation would eventually bloom. I walked by our old place a handful of times after we moved, but never did see the full grown hyacinths in bloom.
Sometimes we scatter seeds and can’t ever know what became of them. Does that mean that we cannot still enjoy the zest that accompanies such an act of our own faith in the future? Looking back, I can see that tucking dreams (and seeds) into the dark (and the soil) was (and still is) the most active form of prayer. We hope with our hearts, we ask with our voices - yes. But we also must get to work with our own two hands, doing the work of fashioning a future from the fantasy we’ve nurtured for ever so long.
I’ll leave you with a poem (below) that I composed based on the memory of those hyacinth bulbs, and just one of several spring themed poems that will be appearing in this season’s Spring Energy Zine. I hope it inspires each of you to enjoy the sweetest Secret Garden time of year yet. Don’t stop glimpsing the green and the glimmers amidst the grey.
Beauty Can Explode
Today I tucked a handful of hyacinth bulbs into the soil to sleep for the winter,
like queens clothed in purple,
taking one last slumber before rising to power,
quietly becoming in the dark and cold,
unseen but living still.
Then, in the first few Secret Garden days of spring,
when my heart longs for warmth,
they might just burst forth from the ground
(proof that beauty can explode into being from nowhere)
and announce that all long, hard things shall pass,
even our own darkness.
Just ordered my copy:)
I meant to send you a picture of it--the production is so impressive!