Finding Faraway Nearby

For years I believed that awe required distance and wonder was something you found chasing across deserts or mountain ranges. But spring demonstrates how wrong that view can be. Transformation and renewal unfold quietly in my ordinary local patch, the trick is simply to notice.

Each year I find the dark half of the calendar more difficult to endure, the skies lower, the days shorter, the gloom more insistent. Yet just as I begin to feel myself cracking, I usually catch sight of the smallest changes, as tentative as a whisper, that herald the approach of spring and the return of all the good and gentle things I had begun to forget.

It was Imbolc, the quiet Gaelic festival marking the midpoint between the solstice and the equinox. It’s a hinge in the year so slight you could easily miss it if you were not paying attention.

Walking out, I hear the woodland beginning to stir. There’s an increase in birdsong, a subtle ratcheting up of activity among the branches. Life seemed to lift.

The signs were everywhere once I took the trouble to notice them. Snowdrops pushing through the damp soil, their white heads rising in delicate crowds among the green leaves of dog’s mercury. They have had many names over the years: Candlemas bells, February fair maids, Mary’s tapers. All of them seem to acknowledge their role as bringers of light. A woodpecker hammered somewhere out of sight while the rain drummed steadily on my hood. A great tit repeated its persistent cry of ‘teacher, teacher’ with such conviction that it was difficult not to smile at its enthusiasm. Rosehips hung like tiny jewels from bare branches, each red berry carrying a perfect raindrop bright enough to catch even the dullest light. Winter aconites provided little bursts of yellow on the woodland floor and the gorse added its own surprising colour. Even the hazel trees were preparing themselves, their thousands of catkins trembling in the mild breeze as though waking from a long sleep. By the time I headed home I realised I had walked myself into a better frame of mind. The reluctance that had weighed me down at the start of the day had eased, replaced by a faint stirring of optimism. There was new life rising in the woods and, in a small way, in me as well.

And then there is a moment at the end of February when the light returns with enough conviction to be felt. Winter has shed its ferocity. The mornings arrive with a faint shimmer of promise and the evenings stretch themselves wider as if testing how far they might soon reach. You step outside and smell something other than damp for the first time in months, a thin freshness to the air, a trace of earth beneath the cold. Spring begins not with colour but with possibility, and that possibility seems to grow with every passing day.

The faraway is often much nearer than we think.