Can you ‘feel’ spring?
Originally published 23-03-2026 on Substack
I’m a morning person, and as a morning person, I particularly love this time of year. Earlier light in the mornings, being woken up to birds chirping, sunshine that feels warm on your skin even in 8°C, not to mention the budding magnolia trees, a fleeting week of cherry blossoms, and my personal favorite the hyacinth popping up out of the ground in the most random and delicate places. If you know me, if I pass by a hyacinth, I can’t not smell it. Try it next time, it’s delicious.
There is a certain feeling I get in spring which makes what once felt impossible in the dark winter months to be now not only achievable but desirable. I find myself springing (pun intended) out of bed more easily (and earlier), spending more time in nature, and just generally feeling more ‘glass half full’. If I was looking for explanations, one could be the vitamin C. But that hardly explains why I still feel energized from the bird calls, or joyful at the smell of a fresh flower.
There are so many shifts happening during spring; changes in the circadian rhythm leading to longer days, our immune system is reawakening, our gut-brain axis is rising, we begin a hormonal awakening and, our nervous system is allowed to soften. All of these, I would classify as a new cycle of energy, now out of the winter and into the spring there is this energy around which is everything coming back to life again. Waking up from hibernation, blooming, budding, dawning.
Can you imagine what it would feel like to be a bright new bud coming out of a tree that’s been hibernating all winter? Or expand even further to imagine the full forest where every tree now begins to have new buds? In fact, isn’t that’s precisely what’s also happening in us?
Out of our kitchen window, we are graced to see the full spectrum of the seasons in the forest. And as much as I love it when the trees are coated in fresh white snow, I think my favorite has to be spring time. When it goes from this brown, dark and thin forest to a full canvas with dots of green everywhere. And better yet, it seems to happen overnight.
These things — to hear a bird chirping, to smell fresh flowers, to see a bright new bud — are so innately human. We shouldn’t, nor why would we want to forget the power in these beautiful little life forces for our technology; no matter now easy it might be to pick up the phone versus look at the sky. The irony is that I write this; staring at my screen, I’m listening to the birds and every so often checking in on the sunrise (it’s a beautiful cotton candy pink and bright blue). Because I do believe that these seasonal awakenings, give way for our own personal awakenings.
I don’t believe the question is whether our bodies can help us create systemic change, but rather how can they help us be our sensing instrument? How can we learn to listen closer to our bodies and our body’s connection to the earth so that we can begin to understand our innate power and wisdom. After all, we’re made of earth. There’s a collective consciousness energy when spring arrives which I believe can be felt by all of us. And trust me, if you stop to smell the hyacinth’s every time you see them, you’ll get what I mean.
Not a hyacinth, but a beautiful spring joy nonetheless.
