Spring: The Season of Hope

Oh Spring! It’s a season of contrast. Winter has ended (unless you live in Colorado, as I do, and winter continues to return until you’ve mowed the lawn at least once or twice). It’s a time of renewal, when dormant things come back to life. It’s also a time of change and anticipation and unsettledness. 

One April day, I published a story about suicide in which the headline writers highlighted data showing that suicides peak in the spring. Researchers don’t know why this is, but I’ve noticed that I tend to get a weird bout of ennui or even mild depression in the spring for no particular reason. It never lasts, and it always confounds me, because I love the sense of possibility and renewal that spring heralds. 

I live on a small farm and orchard, and right now it’s a magical place, full of blooming fruit trees and the wondrous fragrance of fruit blossoms. Walking through our orchard when the trees are blooming is one of the things that make me most grateful to be alive. Apricot blooms are my favorite fragrance, but plums are not far behind. Pear trees have a distinct, but less sweet aroma, and the cherry trees are nice, but lag behind the others. Although I enjoy comparing the aroma of the various blooms, what’s most important is to take a moment to appreciate how fortunate I am to be here to experience these natural wonders. I love to stand beneath an apricot tree in bloom, close my eyes and take in the fragrance while listing to the buzz of pollinators visiting the blooms.

The last 100 days have been a doozy (history will have things to day) and I’m trying to lean into the possibilities that spring brings. No matter how bad things seem, the future is not written yet, and it’s important to remember that when you’ve tempted to lose hope. Read more: Spring: The Season of Hope

Hope. It’s the thing with feather and also just the thing that we need right now. Our person of LWON, Rebecca Boyle just won the LA Times Book Award (a really big fucking big, yay!) and she says it better than I ever could. She is just such an incredible writer and thinker, so I’m jus going to share what the LA Times quoted her saying in her acceptance speech:

“The moon, my subject, does remind us that there are cycles,” she said while accepting the prize. “Inherent in the meaning of a cycle or a phase is a return. Things go away and they come back. Fascism went away and now is back. Authoritarianism went away, we thought, and now it is back. But there’s a flip side to that. Every phase that leaves brings something new. There’s also hope and renewal. And I think part of our job — the most important job we have as writers — is to remind us of the positive phases, the return of good, the return of new cycles and hope.” In her closing remarks, she quoted Pope Francis, whose funeral is Saturday: “Hope is a gift and a task.”

A mutual friend of ours shared a video of part of Becky’s acceptance speech in which she said this: 

“Hope is a gift that we are given, but it is a job that we have — it is a responsibility to ourselves and to our readers and our communities.”

The future is not yet set, my friends. Let’s join together with our friends, family and community to take that gift of hope, take our vision for a more loving, better future — Let’s make it so.