Spring in the northern hemisphere could be compared to the earth giving birth. As earth’s kin, we might even experience Spring as a sense of revival, a waking up to the bold imperative of creation that moves within our bodies. This is the same power that pushes cement out of the way if it has to, or grows trees precariously rooted in a rock face. As any woman knows who has given birth naturally, the process is deeply engaged, powerful, and uncompromising in its direction. Spring is definitely not a wallflower.
Nature is a force of immeasurable intelligence and capacity. Nowhere do we see this more than in the Spring as branches that look dead begin to come to life. Our human collective however, has become like wallflowers on the side-lines of life. We seek our belonging in pre-determined ways from outside of ourselves. It is a confused and confusing phenomenon. Teilhard de Chardin reminds us that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, not a human body that has a soul. The latter creates wallflowers, while the former aligns with the power of surging Spring life.
Spiritual embodiment is a flow of connected intelligence that is beyond our control. When the truth of life flows in our neural pathways as raw emotions we are informed by life holistically. While living in the world of time, we have a simultaneous experience of timelessness. Throughout much of human history, our ability to separate life from how it really is has allowed us to carry on under huge duress. We have learned to survive this way as a species, but it has also set us adrift from embodied wisdom— the wisdom of life as it is.
Being set adrift from ourselves and life-as-it-is leads to a tendency to experience life as something that happens to us. We become wallflowers looking the part rather than embodying life as part of creation. Spring is life dressed in full regalia—proud, regal, and uncompromising. If she could speak, and we could listen, her rousing pep talk might go like this: “Away with your fine ideas of how I should be. Come out and play with me in your naked vulnerability, your authenticity—give your humanness to me as you are— your pain, joy, rage, fierce love, tender love, numb, hopelessness, shyness etc.— just be real so we can dance.”
Spring percolating within our nervous system is the mystic’s heart in full voice and the gestated depth of winter’s stillness appearing in the world. Spring is an unconditional celebration of “now” where body, soul, heart, and mind are danced into one unified song. Gratefully we surrender “ideas” of life for a more fluid and alive relationship with life. Living life from the sidelines just doesn’t make sense anymore.
In five years of facilitating the Inner Constellation Mobile, I have concluded two things: firstly, this is the hardest work we will ever do (few do); and secondly, the simple beauty of this work is life’s best-kept secret (from ourselves). We have forgotten that life is meant to be a wild ride designed to wake us up. Are we not being reconfigured, re-wired, and transformed at an astonishing rate through our current challenges? Old ways are crumbling as subtle capacities begin to emerge from the rubble.
Is this not a reason to allow the exiled and wounded parts of our collective to enter into the Spring festivities? Their unconscious soil provides rich nourishment for birthing the hope, wisdom, laughter, and love of humanity. Let’s find our place in the ground that grows the impossible just as trees find their roots in a rock face. Spring is not a time to be a wallflower. It is time to live everything we have ever dreamed of by leaning into everything we never imagined we could. Together in our courage, we celebrate the beauty of Spring as she sings us back into life from the sidelines.