Articles

Spring: The Breath of Life

copyright 2011, all rights reserved, Donna La Pré

Have you ever smelled a snowdrop? Perhaps you are even surprised to learn a snowdrop bears fragrance. This exquisitely formed little blossom, one of the signs of spring-coming-to-be (though the varieties of snowdrops scan a flowering period from October to March), exudes a vegetal scent like a mixture of faint kaffir lime and vetiver overlaid with the candy-sweet odor of bearded iris. The wise bees know something is being offered inside the white and green floret’s domain, for it is one of the few flowers offering nectar sustenance when the bees emerge on warm days to eliminate (polite term for going to the loo.)

Herein is one delightful outer-form-in-nature phenomenon we can appreciate with our physical senses. If we go further, and teach ourselves to pay deep attention to the inner life of the seasons, many marvels await us.

Outer manifestations of the Earth’s natural four seasons are often portrayed in our modern world of technological fas?cination, disconnected from nature and subtle impulses, rather primitively in a temperate-climate four season scheme, something roughly like this: flowers reappear; it gets warmer then hotter and food grows in the garden; then the leaves color up and flowers turn brown; it gets cold and snows. With that summary of nature and its seasons, we can just get on with “life” and attend to its demands. Yet, how many of them are demands we have placed upon ourselves, through technological inventions and the virtual realities they have spawned? How many of these demands are essential and then, can we even identify and sort what is and is not “natural” and essential to life and our living? To be able to observe the inner qualities of the nature requires that we are able to discern at the very least:

1. what is natural, ie, organic and what is not.
2. what is essential to life and living, and what is not, in other words, what is added on, made up, constructed.
   Then, we also need to overcome, or work towards overcoming our preferences (sympathies) and prejudices (antipathies) in order to develop our sense perceptions with higher levels of thinking, freed from biases we have assumed like a pair of obstructing glasses.

Once we have worked out our concepts and perceptions of these differences, we can consider the subject of seasons, and begin a path of learning the inner signatures of each one. For this it is also necessary to refer at times to the physical manifestations, as a stepping-off place, to compare, also to find the leaving -the -physical and entering -the -etheric borderland.

An event universally recognized as Spring occurs each year. How do we know it is spring? How does our daily working consciousness register, “ now it is spring”? Do we merely rely on concepts that refer to time, such as daylength, holidays, dates and months on a calendar? Or solely on phenological references, such as seeing a certain flower appear, experiencing a specific temperature?

One of the first realizations we might have is that to follow a more subtle–sense sign, we could compare spring to what comes before --- winter--- what follows, summer and what is its opposite, autumn. We might find it most helpful to begin with a physical sensing, but one that is more attentive, sensitive and complex, to find the link to the subtle sense world currents.

Winter is (in a temperate climate) colder. Most vegetation, other than coniferous trees and plants with evergreen leaves has withdrawn or exists in skeletal form. The sunlight is less full and rich and the air for breathing is leaner. Ground color palettes tend to a myriad of tertiary greys, browns, duns and ochres. When it snows there can be various whites, from warm to cold, yellow tinged or blue-shadowed and sometimes revealing the faintest impress of a rainbow spectrum. With further looking at the ground level, it is possible to see brightish yet “dead” green hues under leaf mulches, at the base of tall grasses and in wet areas, also under trees on slopes and in warmer spots. Towards spring, as the sap begins to rise again, one can observe the faint reds and greens shining through the bark on tree and shrub branches and in the bud nodes emerging from the stems.

Now, we cannot find a strict division between winter and spring. It is not that we retire one evening after a period of zero degree cold in a white carpeted snow world and wake up to a consistently altered duration of mild, balmy air; pastel flowers, pale green leaves and nest building bird activity. No, there is a slow emergence and exchange, a transference and metamorphosis of one season’s qualities and outer forms into another. Yet if we really become able to hone our perceptions and thinking, we will find notes, intimations of the next season in the midst of one before as well as a reverse parallel between each opposing season: winter/summer; autumn/spring. In winter, at the time of the solstice and Christmas, while the contraction of earth’s life drawn into itself is most intense, we have the “return” of the light. What is this light, not only in its physical garment of sun’s rays in space affecting time as a measure of sunlight in our days, but as light’s innerness: the subtle or spiritual qualities? We’ll come back to this thought.

Moving to the season following spring we have summer in all its warm, dreamy atmosphere rich with fragrances, volatile oils, sounds and feelings. Insects flicker and flit in movements like effervescent light-beams. This atmosphere is denser, more physically lively than that of winter, suffused with a brightness more penetrating, more intimate than winter’s oblique Sol. Even vivid plant colors seem temporarily to take on a lesser hue under the gaze of a hot midday summer sun! It is as if we are being seen through and through, almost scrutinized. Birds tend to concentrate their activities in the morning and evening, retiring to the green comfort of trees on a torpid day. There is something markedly different about the light in summer. Its intensity may contribute to effects of retreating and withdrawing to the shade or shelter of a darkened, cooler room; while in winter, the pale light’s meager warmth draws us out of our shelters, to experience its encouraging warmth.

Now we can move backwards again in seasons to contemplate spring, placed between the poles of greatest cold and contraction- centripetal forces and gravity- and maximum heat and expansion- centrifugal forces and levity. Between these two, something must appear that wasn’t present before. In other words, how does one state become its opposite?
The Earth lives in a yearly soul-cycle akin to the human breathing processes. The expression of the Earth’s being comes to life again in spring, actually rises from below and begins ascending to the periphery and the year’s zenith point, the Summer solstice. As the earth “exhales”, through elemental processes informed by cosmic ones, plants spiral upwards towards and following the movements of the Sun; animals stir and human beings change their daily habits somewhat in response to the season. We find movement and change, growing and transformation in physicality to be the significant outer manifestation of spring. Somewhat more subtly, we may notice the organic chemical compounds in the air, especially the kind aligned with reproductive forces. Everywhere there are subtle chemicals related to forces of attraction and birth in nature. Humans wish to more to do and make and engage socially in the world. As spring unfolds we begin to anticipate levity and feel uplifted as the intimation of Life in the Light of winter darkness becomes a physical and life-force-sense reality. The glimmer of hope seen in cold and gloom months before now takes on weight and flesh in the vegetation, newborn animals and human projects, especially in gardens and on farms.

If spring is an experience of metamorphosis in life seeking the light, we can then think about its opposite season, autumn. One thing that may have come to mind, while thinking about winter contrasted with summer is that what is opposite also shows alike tendencies, although expressed in a different form or manner.

Autumn as we all know is the time of year marked by the decline of the Sun’s strength upon one hemisphere of the earth, while in the other it is waxing. In this declination of the Sun, Earth’s vegetal cloak begins to wane, heading towards the underworld, desiccating, rotting and hues of brown, taupe, even charcoal. Yet on the way to this mattering and mulching, are we sensitive to perceiving the forces released, life forces that brought the plants to fruition? We can physically see evidence of these life forces through the colors, glorious fiery crimsons, scarlets and oranges; otherworldly golds and chartreuse that appear in leaves and stems as effects of this transition and release time. How can we hone our receptive observation, inner and outer, to begin sensing another level of these freed forces? A curious outer (physical) nature clue is that in a temperate climate, and here specifically in the upper Mid-Atlantic region, many plants that appear in spring, weeds such as deadnettle, chickweed appear again. It is again favorable to grow lettuces and leaves such as Kale, mustard and chicory.

Now the Sun and days may still be warm, yet there is a felt mellowness, a ripeness that points to abundance if we engage our human will to make the best use of our harvests. In a spring vegetable garden we must work to plant seeds, yet there and in the wild there is an expectation of more to come. This is a different sense of abundance, a naturally given and increasing one, than the abundance of fall which we must engage with more as human activity, self-directed, to gather the last fruits, seeds, leaves and roots and replenish the soil by manuring and adding compost or winter cover cropping. The changing quality of air and temperature, more comfortable than that of summer aids these labors. Do we feel melancholic in autumn, or perhaps do we feel the change as loss, yet a sense of renewal also, at some point?

In the beginning we spoke of learning to perceive the more subtle inner life of the seasons, of light and the processes in nature. We can’t exclude ourselves in this noticing work either, as we are the instruments of perception and thinking who experience. In the example of the snowdrop’s possibly unnoticed fragrance…a subtle phenomena in that one would have to notice the bees’ relief in finding the blossoms and then investigate why that is so; or either to crawl on hands and knees or pick some and sniff.

There are many events in the inner life of nature that reveal in a kind of subtle landscape of subtle sense-feelings, ones that are the bones and muscle of the finest, noblest poetic and artistic creations. In autumn, season of dying away, seemingly the antithesis of spring, these subtle inner feelings in the Earth’s “breathing” may register as a kind of epimorphosis of vernal renewal and refreshment, though taking place in a different sphere than the predominant physicality of spring.
Let us return our gaze to the snowdrop, species galanthus (milk flower) nivalis (growing in snow), considering its form with a more artistic, delicate empiricism, borrowing Goethe’s phrase.

Galanthus are monocotyledons, which we can find in other spring flowers, such as the hyacinth and tulip and then the grasses. Their leaf and petal venations are vertical, as with all monocots and their scent bears more vegetal impression, a ”green” note, in perfumery terms. A slender, nymphlike green stem form emerges from the leaves which rise upwards, like a fountain and fall into an open fan shape as the stem, curving with the weight of the pedicel and cup-like receptacle bearing the pendent blossom, holds itself like a shepherd’s crook, the milk white opaque flower like a lantern, closed at first. As the floweret of the non-double types of snowdrop begins to open, we can see the typical six-petalled form characteristic of monocots. The outer three petals open outwards and downwards, revealing three shorter, inner petals, as if a modest petticoat were hidden under the skirt.

Excepting for the few yellow-marked and receptacled varieties of galanthus, these inner petals are stamped with vivid green prints that resemble at first, a heart shape, and then as the flower progress, depict a form one could imagine as a kind of chalice, a heart atop a swollen lower receptacle, very similar to botanical ovarian forms. This heart and later, chalice, faces downward, towards the earth. In some cases, the chalice marking develops to appear as double hearts, one pointing in to earth, the other towards the sky. Casting a golden, glowing light in the sanctum of the inner petals, we find the anthers, warmed with grains of pollen. How marvelous to encounter the exquisite daintiness with which this demure flower holds her prize, like the Virgins with oil enough in their lamps, waiting for bees and the loving eyes of humans.

It is very interesting that the Victorian language of flowers symbolism, pithy though it was, still expressed something of truth and older inner knowledge of plants and their soul-spiritual qualities. In this floral lexicon, snowdrops were seen as flowers of purity and hope.

Turning to the world of colors, which is a world itself, we may also want to reflect on the colors that appear arrested in physical form, as in plants, and then back to the world of living, or spiritual colors which are not perceived with physical senses. In the human subtle body known as the soul body, colored centers develop. These were called chakras (cakram or wheels) in Sanskrit. From these ancient Eastern teachings, knowledge of the spiritual colors presiding each chakra was given and still adhered to by many. However, these colors were viewed long ago, from a certain Cosmic “position”, while human beings have evolved, and so has spiritual perception (position) of those whose knowledge has kept up to date in correspondence with this evolution. So while in the older Eastern systems, the heart center was seen as green, Rudolf Steiner 1 observed that it was the human throat center that emitted a green light. This chakra center is concerned with perceiving the laws of nature, and indeed a level of nature’s soul light, in the sphere of manifesting form, is vivid green. The human heart center is golden yellow, like the pollen softly glowing in the snowdrop’s depths, like the softer winter Sun. We have green, golden and then white, which is the spiritual color Steiner ascribed the planetary form of the Sun. White light is considered to be the light of the sun’s spiritual being, and so it is associated with salvific cosmic forces of renewal and possibilities yet to manifest physically.

And so, a mysterious picture of something other-than-physical, yet through the physical appears each year in the humble yet elegant snowdrop. First the thick grass-blade -like leaves poke above the earth, then part to reveal the slender stem and chaste white blossom, hiding the image of green hearts, a chalice and an inner heart of fructifying golden light deep within. There too is concealed its last secret, the fragrance that seems to span a spectrum of scent types to come: green, floral, fruity, the plant gifts of the ascending part of the year. Interestingly, when the snowdrop withers, its scent is suggestive of roots, their tang and earthy must.

What is fragrance to spring but the breath of the earth? Literally fragrance is carried in the air. Soulfully, the suffusion of fragrances stirs memories and feelings, perhaps of associations to other forms in nature and also our experiences of biographical life, its events and settings. On one spiritual level the “breathing” is an etheric-sphere movement, portraying or reflecting physical images of this spiritual process. As in autumn, during death in nature, we can have a sense of the spring’s revivification and rebirth through effort applied to our own inner life, in spring we so vividly experience how life comes and arises from death, a spiritual and physical breath of life that stirs the soul and the soul of nature in fashioning the world of physical beauty we wonder anew at each year.

Donna La Pré, 2011
1True and False Paths In Spiritual Investigation, Rudolf Steiner