Hey y’all,
I’m in a gathering mood. Montaigne said he made bouquets of out of other writer’s flowers. I feel like making a spring bouquet.
Yesterday was the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. The earth’s tilt is perpendicular to the sun’s rays, and it will now slowly tilt towards the light. We’re headed for summer now, while our neighbors in the southern hemisphere are headed towards winter.
I used to be “Mr. Autumn Man,” but spring and the new growth has meant more to me in recent years because of our new normal of nasty winter storms here in Austin, Texas.
I started spring off last year by reading Martin Gayford’s Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. It was the right book at just the right time. If you’re looking for a lift, I can’t recommend it enough.
Hockney is one of my favorite artists. In Keep Going I wrote that I want to make his words my own motto: “I’ll go on until I fall over.” (I also wrote about him and his relationship to technology around this time last year.)
In the studio I have a poster from his “The Arrival of Spring” show and near my desk I have a picture of him that stares at me, as if he’s saying, “Well? What are you waiting on? GET TO WORK.”
During the lockdown Hockney wrote:
I intend to carry on with my work, which I now see as very important. We have lost touch with nature rather foolishly as we are a part of it, not outside it. This will in time be over and then what? What have we learned? I am 83 years old, I will die. The cause of death is birth. The only real things in life are food and love in that order, just like our little dog Ruby. I really believe this and the source of art is love. I love life.
(A spring earworm has suddenly stuck in my head: Buck Owens singing “Love’s Gonna Live Here.”)
In Joy Williams’ essay “Autumn” she writes about being careful about the optimism of spring:
There is no such thing as time going straight on to new things. This is an illusion. Okay? And clinging to this illusion makes it difficult to understand oneself and one's life and what is happening to one. Time is repetition, a circle. This is obvious. Day and night, the seasons, tell us this. Even so, we don't believe it. Time is not a circle, we think. Spring screams the opposite to us, of course, and summer seduces us into believing that we're all going to live forever….
Horace was not seduced! Here he is in The Odes (IV, 7):
Gone is the whiteness
of snow—
green returns
in the grass of the fields,
in the canopies of trees,
and the airy grace of spring
is with us again.
Thus time revolves,
the passing hour that steals
the light
brings a message:
immortality, for us, is impossible.
Warm winds will be followed by cold.
And neither was Philip Larkin — this is the time of year I recite his poem “The Trees” to myself: “The trees are coming into leaf / like something almost being said” but “their greenness is a kind of grief…”
While we’re on the subject of dark mixing with the light — gardening has provided me with yet another creative metaphor. I came across this fact while cutting up a book for the collage at the top of the page:
“Botanists used to think that the length of daylight a plant was exposed to determines whether it would form flowers. But... it’s the length of darkness that a plant experiences that plays the most crucial role.”
A taxonomy of plants:
(1) long-day (or, more accurately, short-night) plants that normally bloom in spring and summer
(2) short-day (or long-night) plants that normally bloom in fall and winter
(3) plants that need an equal amount of day and night
(4) plants that are indifferent to the length of day and night
Like my friend Clayton Cubitt says, “The photographic rules of exposure also apply to life: you either need more light, or more time. And all the time in the world won’t help you if you don’t have any light.”
“I suppose an artist or any person who continues to grow is like a tree or any living thing,” writes Martin Gayford. “A plant takes in water, minerals, light, and carbon dioxide and transforms them into leaves and flowers. In the same way, people who continue to blossom also need to carry on processing fresh thoughts and experiences.”
But you must know what season you’re in! For me, this has been the year that somehow refuses to get started. But maybe the spring will also be a creative spring. It’s feeling just like it might be....
xoxo,
Austin
Yesterday, on the first day of spring, I was in my office on a work Zoom call. My son, a senior, arrived home from school. He tiptoed toward my desk. I gave him a low wave out of camera range and a quick smile. He emptied his hand onto my desk. He left the room and, on my notepad, a palm-size cherry blossom sprig.
Spring always feels like the day you feel better after being sick for what felt like years. You realize it’s all going to be ok.