These days I find myself walking through the woods and noticing something that always touches me.
Just a few weeks ago the trees were completely naked, branches in their winter bareness, and now suddenly the same branches are full of tiny buds, the first leaves pushing out, the whole landscape quietly turning itself again towards the light.
And as I walk there is that familiar recognition that we are not separate from nature, that the same rhythms move through us.
We have winters and springs too.
And yet I notice that this winter, like so many of us, I have not really gone into winter. Not as deeply as I would have liked.
I have been producing.
Not in a negative way, many beautiful things have been moving, retreats, conversations, writing, projects unfolding, but still I notice how easily we are carried by the current of a culture that is always moving forward, optimising speed, producing, doing, achieving, becoming.
There is very little space left for winter.
For the pause.
For the going inward.
For the darkness where something deeper gestates before it appears.
With our lights always on, our endless connectivity, our year-round movement, the natural rhythm of dropping down into the soil of ourselves easily disappears.
And unless we consciously step out of that fast lane, unless we create spaces of retreat, of silence, of depth, we are simply carried by the collective river of movement.
I feel how much I too have been moving in that river.
And now spring arrives.
And as I walk among these trees that are once again offering their first leaves to the light, I feel something similar beginning to stir in my own landscape.
New seeds.
Two seeds in particular that are beginning to show themselves.
One of them is the book that has been slowly gestating in the background for quite some time now. A transmission map, you could say, for the times we are living in. For a paradigm that is clearly collapsing, and for something that is trying to emerge through the cracks.
But that emergence is not clean.
It is not clear yet.
We are living in what I feel to be a liminal space, an in-between territory where the old structures are losing their ground and the new ones have not yet fully taken form.
And liminal spaces are vulnerable spaces.
In them we can easily move backwards, fall into repetition, into fear, into the safety of what we already know. Or we can begin to listen more deeply and allow something new to reveal itself through us.
Alongside the book, another seed is appearing.
A space where men and women can come together to deepen in that inquiry.
Not as couples work, not as women’s work, but as human beings willing to explore the living axis between the masculine and the feminine within us, the places where we have become divided, hardened, defended, and the places where something much more alive is waiting to be reclaimed.
A space to slow down.
To listen again.
To step out of the speed of the world and re-enter a more essential rhythm.
More about this soon.
For now I simply wanted to share this moment of spring, this quiet uprising of life that reminds me that something new is always trying to emerge, not only in the forests around us but also in the deeper landscapes within us.
And sometimes the only thing required is that we pause long enough to notice.