Spring and the Beauty of the Expected

Photo courtesy of Roman Biernacki via Pexels

I wrote in my diary in April 2024: I like spring the most because the sunlight takes you by surprise. The winter before that had been sapping, one of those periods of cold, hard darkness that makes you forget what warmth feels like. 

However, spring saw me truly parallel its growth and abundance. April brought with her a cornucopia of love and sacrality, and shifted the world slightly so that the light shone on it differently. While I lived it, April did not feel particularly transformative, only gentle and lustring. It was later- hand in hand with hindsight- that I look back to April and see the line she drew behind her and how real my life has felt since stepping over it.

This past winter of 2024 was just as cold and dark-if not colder and darker- yet something of that April stayed in me, tugging me softly back to earth when the winds sought to sweep me from it. When the air bit that bit more than I could handle, I thought of what April had offered me on her blue-sky platter, wound my scarf tighter around my neck, and waited to be surprised by the sun again. 

I was not. Spring this year did not sneak up on me; I saw the first daffodil before it had yellowed, made note of the first day where sunshine split the sky, and began buying mini eggs from the day they hit the shelves. Spring this year felt like it faded into view while I was watching. Maybe if I had shut my eyes, forgotten how it felt, and opened them again in my Nan’s garden in full bloom, I would have been surprised again. Even then, maybe I would not have been. Perhaps this year is just one where life remains still and glassy, resistant to rippling, like an untouched pool, but what this year’s waxing spring has taught me is that so often beauty comes in the form of the expected.

I used to worry that I had spent myself as a writer because mostly all I could find myself coming back to was writing about the sun and all the things it touches. I worried that because Wordsworth, Blake, and Dickinson had put their pens to paper having breathed in and out a spring day that I had to write about something else in order to baptise myself as Poet. Some falsely conceived constraint of originality for too long prevented me from realising how wonderful the sun is because many before me had realised it first. 

I see now that being a poet is not a life of isolation, but one of silent community; where a shimmering thread endowed with the ability to see a certain beauty in life and make that beauty readable is strung through the hearts of each of us, loosely stringing us like bunting. I’ve come to see it as a comfort, rather than a threat to my art. I am privileged to see spring upon spring and feel struck by them not only in the same way as writers before me, but as myself. It no longer scares me to find myself musing on spring year in, year out; is it not some small miracle to love something ceaselessly and to find yourself returning to its praise? 

All the while when spring was arriving this year I felt it, had waited in eager anticipation of that time when the sun would tilt back its head again and the frostbitten earth would give way to headstrong crocuses. I was still so touched by Aprils prior, I didn’t have it in me to be caught unawares; some of its cotton-soft air was still bumping about in my lungs gently asking me to stay as serene as I had been then, and yet this didn’t steal from the way I loved it. Not once did I think to myself that I was bored or unimpressed by what I had seen before. If anything there was a certain peace I settled into, a feeling that I had eroded a seat in the cliff face of the world, earned by a steady staying in place, patience and enthrallment. 

I think often we move on from things too fast, have a constant need for newness, and hold out hope for the next leap forward so fervently that we forget the strength of what remains, what is solid, and what returns without fail; we forget that true beauty is not fragility - it is whatever lies sleeping quietly in memory, letting minds caress it every now and then, remembering in perfect detail the way it feels breathing under fingertips, reassurance in the awareness of its whereabouts, seeing every unhurried move as it fades back into view. 

Writing this now, I am starting to see this love of the expected crop up in other places in my life, traditions I have fixed for no other reason than I find it a comfort: to reread The Old Man and the Sea every August, to buy a crate of tangerines the day they start being sold with the leaves still attached. These things that return only grow in beauty year to year. Not because they are changing or becoming more beautiful, but because of small shifts in perception. Life leaves impressions in supple flesh like fingerprints in clay;  my eyes this year are not the same eyes I had last year or the year before. This spring, which returns unchanged and expected, has not only its inherent beauty but a layer of sweet comparison draped across it too. 

I bought a bunch of daffodils in the last few weeks of March, unbloomed, I put them in sugar water and waited. When they finally opened a week and a half into April they were perfect, frilly little fried eggs, tilted heads nearly too heavy for their necks resting on the edge of the glass like a windowsill child, chin on the ledge, eyes up, gazing. Though they are long gone I remember them vividly, their forms seeping into those of the bunches of the year before, but in anticipation of their fluorescence, I decided to be patient. I know how hard and brave it is to become what you are meant to be. 

In a funny way, I still thought their little green fingertips were beautiful and I would have forgiven them if they had stayed that way all spring long- but of course they didn’t. I knew they wouldn’t, and still when they opened up exactly as they always have, I praised their sacred constancy.

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Edited by Hania Ahmed and Roxy-Moon Dahal-Hodson