My body started its own spring cleaning
Audio version:
This winter was a long one here in New England; many of us referred to it as the winter of our childhood. The snow kept coming and stayed because of the unusually cold weather. Honestly, I loved it. I thought, with the earth warming, that we’d never see another winter like this one.
Then spring came with buds popping and trees blooming. Collectively, we exhaled; we were done with winter and needed spring to arrive. Mother Nature, ever-so-powerful, the unpredictability, the reminder that we’d better release control and predictions, or else we’ll be disappointed if we don’t.
With this came the reminder that I am also nature, and that the natural evolution of the season lives in me too. The coziness of winter was pulling away, and spring, with all its force and urging, was coming in whether I liked it or not.
I first noticed it through my sleep. My early-to-bed, early-to-rise rhythm shifted, and I was getting out of bed later than usual. This threw me off. I love my routines — yoga, my rest practice, journaling, and often days slipped past without them because I was waking later than I was used to.
Then my eating began to change. The soups and stews I’d leaned on all winter suddenly felt too heavy. I wanted greens. I wanted citrus. I wanted something alive on the plate. My body, it seemed, was doing its own spring cleaning without consulting me.
At first, I resisted. (Of course I did.) I tried to force the old rhythm back to bed early, up with the sun, the same breakfast, the same practice at the same hour. But the body is not the mind, and the body was already moving with the season. It had decided. I was the last to know.
And then I softened. I let the later mornings be later mornings. I let the lighter meals be the lighter meals. I let my practice shift in shape sometimes shorter, sometimes at a different hour, sometimes just a few minutes of Yoga Nidra before bed instead of at dawn. Nothing was lost. It was simply rearranging itself to match the season that was already here.
This is what I keep learning, and keep forgetting, and keep learning again: I am not separate from the earth turning. What happens out there happens in here. The buds pushing through bare branches are pushing through me, too. The loosening of the frozen ground is a loosening in my own tissues. The longer light is asking me to stretch into it.
Spring cleaning, it turns out, was never really about the house.
It was about letting the season have its way with me. About trusting that my body knows how to move with the turning, even when my mind wants to keep everything exactly as it was. About remembering, once again, that surrender is not giving up. It’s coming home.
With love from my corner by the sea, Sarah
