by Carl Kruse
There is a moment, somewhere between the last frost and the first crocus, when the Earth makes up its mind. It has been hedging for weeks — sending warmth one afternoon, snatching it back the next morning, dangling the promise of buds only to bury them under one final, indignant snowfall. But today, on this particular Thursday in March, the planet has committed. The sun crosses the celestial equator. Day and night hold their breath in perfect balance, like two old rivals shaking hands. And then: Spring.
It is worth pausing to appreciate what a strange and wonderful piece of cosmological theater this is. We are, after all, a ball of rock and water hurtling through the void at roughly 107,000 kilometers per hour, tilted at a jaunty 23.5 degrees — a tilt that is, when you think about it, the sole reason we have seasons at all, the sole reason this day feels different from any other, the sole reason a person in Berlin or Buenos Aires or Baltimore might step outside this morning and think, with inexplicable certainty: something has changed.
The philosophers have always known that Spring is not merely a meteorological event. It is a permission slip.
The Stoics, those dour lovers of virtue, would have noted that the equinox restores isonomia — equality, balance — to the heavens. But even Marcus Aurelius, who could find a lesson in a dying campfire, surely softened when the wildflowers returned to the Roman hills. The Japanese have a concept, mono no aware — the gentle melancholy of passing things — which they celebrate most rapturously not in autumn but in spring, precisely because the cherry blossoms are so extravagant and so brief. Beauty, they understood, is sharpened by its own impermanence. The blossom is not less lovely for being temporary. It is more so.
And yet Spring, unlike its moody siblings, does not invite us to brood. That is Autumn’s department. Spring is the season of the preposterous optimist, and it insists we join in.
Consider the ambition of a tulip. It has spent months as nothing more than a brown lump in frozen earth, and now it proposes — without apology, without apparent self-doubt — to become something spectacular. It does not ease into it. It does not hedge. It simply emerges, wearing an improbable shade of red or yellow or violet, and presents itself to the world as though its arrival were the most natural thing imaginable. Which, of course, it is. But that is precisely the point: the most natural thing imaginable turns out to be extraordinary.
There is a lesson in the tulip, though it is not a solemn one. It is closer to a joke with a very good punchline. All winter we have been contracting — sleeping longer, eating heavier, moving through the grey world with coats buttoned to the chin and ambitions quietly deferred. And then, with the subtlety of a brass band, Spring arrives and the entire biological world begins to show off. Birds that spent December skulking in hedges suddenly burst into song at four in the morning. Trees that were bare and dignified last week are now covered in blossom like guests who showed up to a black-tie dinner in carnival costumes. Even the light changes character — it stretches, it lingers, it arrives earlier each day as though it has somewhere to be and cannot wait to get there.
One of the quiet philosophical gifts of the equinox is the reminder that the universe operates on a rhythm we did not invent and cannot override. We are, in this age of relentless agency and optimization, profoundly unused to being passengers. Yet here, Spring makes passengers of us all. It was coming whether we were ready or not. The crocuses consulted no calendar app. The swallows filed no flight plan. And perhaps there is relief in that — a rare and gracious exemption from the exhausting business of being in charge.
The ancient world took this seriously. Persephone returns from the underworld, and the Earth’s grief lifts. Ostara’s hare scatters eggs across the warming ground (a story so persistent it survives, in confectionery form, to this very day).
Happy Spring.
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Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Here at the Carl Kruse Blog we love celebrating the seasons, especially Spring, which we try to do every year, such as Aphorisms on Spring, Spring, Again, Spring Equinox and Eggs, and It’s Spring Again, among others.
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