Beauty and Violence

The paradox of Spring

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“When a seed sprouts, it’s a violent process.
The skin breaks and splits in two.
Something dies and something is born.”

Michele Cassou

Here on a land known as San Jose, California, the sky is clear and bright and warmed with the sun. Yet the sky over many other lands, Palestine…Ukraine…Myanmar…Sudan... are grey and fiery from which bombs drop and bullets fly to annihilate entire lineages.

The birds are singing songs of revitalizing renewal. Yet there are children who are weeping until their little starving bodies can no longer muster sound.

The cherry trees have already shed their delicate blossoms to reveal fresh and tender leaves. Blooming daffodils and tulips dance optimistically with the wind. Yet 500 year old olive trees, once ancient and venerable, are burned to ashes among human bones in rubble.

This all brings up in me a very uncomfortable dissonance- a mind-boggling confusion with a seeming lack of harmony. This coexistence seems wrong, yet here we are…

Silken bowls of California poppies hold futures in their powders, pollinators carry those futures forward. And, over 30,035 people in Gaza, with dreams and fears and talents and heartbreaks, have been killed in the last 166 days.

”It hurts to be born.”

Emily Kendal Frey

With the beauty and awe of Spring entering me through all my senses, it’s easy to forget the toil, the force, the violence- if you will, that every single sprouted seed has had to undergo. To break the surface, through a pile of soil, to push against gravity and live soft long enough to develop into something with a resilient stem…

It’s a miracle to be born, and it hurts too. It’s a gift to be alive, and it comes with so much pain. To be alive means to witness and experience death and loss daily. To keep living is to birth and rebirth, to die and die again.

I’m thinking about the beautiful folks in Conscious Creators this season… we’ve been tending to some important seeds of ideas and pursuits. We’re been incubating them together since January even as these seeds have lived in their hearts for years. These seed ventures and visions include hosting creative space for folks in recovery, consulting for inclusion and belonging, washing others’ feet as a caring ritual, experimenting with new ways of educating youth in Denver, fostering third place for feminists in Kenya, and spreading color through poignant paintings by brown hands in the UK.

Collective nourishment of these purposeful, necessary and healing seeds bring too the pains of sprouting and breaking open. Also alive are the stories of doubt, the strategies of perfectionism, the self-preservationist egos that want to avoid, deny, procrastinate or invalidate the seeds and the inevitably laborious process of growing them.

For us to launch something, to trust a dream and give it water and light and collective tending is to also allow our smallness, our doubt-inducing beliefs, our limiting identities and our self-preservationist egos to crack open, to morph, break and die, again and again.

”Spring arrives with death still on her.

Frühjahrsmüdigkeit: the German word
for an emotional state that sometimes translates
as ‘spring fever’ but is better translated as ‘spring fatigue,’
a mood disturbance that people like me say
occurs when spring does that thing it does
with Neruda’s cherry trees…

‘Quiero hacer contigo
lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos.’

A split and froth of blossoms
that makes me feel like breaking open, too.”

Kate Lebo

So if grief, fear, doubt, disturbance or fatigue are as alive for you (like me) as birdsong and magnoliabloom, let us remember that this is the paradoxical way of nature; even in a season in renewal, vitality and rolling hills of glowing wildflowers, there is death, violence and aches of breaking open.

I have 3 openings for 1:1 work in Creative Alchemy™ starting in May. Learn more here and apply for a discovery call to see if the space could be of service to your self-trust, creativity and embodied purpose.