The Earth Remembers How: A letter for the turning season

Fellow Seekers

There is a particular quality of light in early spring that has no name I know of. It arrives before the warmth does — a thinning, a brightening, a change in the angle of things. The shadows go long and blue and the air holds both cold and the memory of something green.

The Earth is soft now in a way that it will not be again until late autumn. If you walk out to a place that has not been paved or compacted, you will feel it underfoot — a slight giving, a yielding, as though the ground is breathing out after a long held stillness. The soil is quite literally loosening. The freeze has released its grip, and the living networks are waking, and somewhere underground, in the dark and wet, root tips are pressing outward with a pressure so steady and quiet it could break stone.

I find I need to go slowly at this time of year. Slower than feels sensible. Slower than the birds, who are already urgent with song — the robins before dawn, the red-winged blackbirds announcing themselves from every wet ditch and cattail stand. They know something. They have been waiting too.

There is a smell that belongs only to this moment: cold mud and last year's leaves beginning to give themselves back, the faint green exhale of the first mosses, something sweet and almost fungal rising from the duff. It is the smell of old becoming new. It is the smell of the world digesting its own past so that something else might grow.

I take it in slowly when I find it. I stop walking and just breathe.

This is a form of medicine, though it does not come in a bottle. The olfactory system is old — ancient, direct, bypassing the thinking mind and landing somewhere deeper. To smell the waking Earth is to be returned to something your body already knows: that this has happened before. That the world has always come back. That you are not separate from the turning.

It is February as I write this, and the green things have not come yet. The ground is still locked in that ambiguous season — not quite winter's deep freeze, not yet the loosening. There are days that smell like spring is thinking about it. Then cold returns and the Earth closes back up and we are left waiting, which is its own kind of practice.

Waiting for green is an old human ache. The body knows what it needs. The eyes go hungry for it — that particular fresh yellow-green that has no equivalent in any other season. We are, most of us, more depleted than we realize by the time February comes: low in light, low in green food, low in the kind of nourishment that only comes from being outside in warmth.

But the green things are coming. They are already decided. Somewhere beneath the cold soil, the Nettles have set their intention.

The first green things appear before we are ready for them. A flush of Chickweed. A rosette of Violet leaves so tender they look edible by light. And then, if you know where to look, the Nettles — arriving like a promise kept.

~ A Medicine Note: Nettle ~

Urtica dioica

Nettle arrives as a sting and a gift in the same breath. She pushes up through the cold-softened earth in dense, dark clusters — leaves deeply toothed, stems square, the whole plant furled with tiny hollow needles that will, if you brush against them without intention, remind you that you are a body with skin.

She is a plant of iron and fire. Of deep nourishment. Nettle is among the most mineral-rich foods available to us at this lean time of year — high in iron, calcium, magnesium, vitamins A and C. She arrives precisely when the body has been longest without green, when we are most depleted from winter's drawing in.

There is relationship wisdom in this. She does not make herself easy to take. She asks for attention, for presence, for a kind of care in the approaching. Wear gloves, or don't — some herbalists prefer the sting, call it a medicine in itself, a waking of the tissues. Steam her, and she softens completely. Make a long infusion of dried leaves — dark and silty, tasting of iron and the deep earth — and drink it like the tonic it is.

To harvest nettle in spring is to enter into reciprocity with the season's first abundance. Take what you need. Leave the rest to go to seed, to feed the caterpillars that depend on her, to become the soil that becomes the next spring's nettle.

Thank her.

Then there is wood sorrel — Oxalis — arriving as small, bright punctuation in the understory. Her leaves are heart-shaped and fold together at night or in rain, as though closing into themselves for protection. They taste of lemon, of something clean and sharp and alive.

~ A Medicine Note: Wood Sorrel ~

Oxalis spp.

Wood sorrel is a plant of small joys. She does not announce herself; she appears in the margin spaces — at the base of old trees, along mossy stone walls, in the tender shade at the edge of things. Her three-parted leaves can be mistaken for clover, but she is her own distinct presence, carrying oxalic acid in her tissues that gives her that bright, citric bite.

She is not a plant of deep tonic work, as nettle is. She is a plant of delight. Of the kind of medicine that arrives as pleasure — as the moment you pause on a walk to eat a handful of something straight from the earth and feel, suddenly, more yourself.

In traditional uses across many cultures, wood sorrel has been eaten as a spring green, used to stimulate digestion and appetite after winter, prepared as a cooling drink. She is high in vitamin C. She is the color of early hope.

Offer her nothing but your attention. Crouch down. Notice the way her leaves hold the light.

This is enough.

Spring does not arrive all at once. They come in increments that can be missed if you are not paying a particular kind of attention: the first red-winged blackbird, then the first peeper frogs threading their small voices through the cold evenings, then the smell of mud and green exhale, then the nettles, then the wood sorrel, then suddenly — somehow — it is undeniably spring and you cannot say exactly when the turning happened.

This is how it always goes. The threshold is not a line. It is a slow crossing that you find yourself on the other side of only after the fact.

I find this deeply comforting. That transformation works this way. Not sudden, not dramatic, but incremental and inevitable. That the Earth does not announce its resurrection — it simply enacts it, one small tender shoot at a time.

Go slowly now. Walk in the wet places. Put your hands in the Earth if you can — cold still, soft, alive. Let the birds be as loud as they need to be. Let the smells of old becoming new move through you.

You have been waiting, too.

The Earth remembers how.

Stay wild and true,
Emily

Disclaimer:

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The purpose of this information is for educational purposes only. Always seek the advice of your own Medical Provider and/or Mental Health Provider regarding any questions or concerns you have about your specific health. As always, please use common sense.

Services provided by Emily Grendahl Risinger and Still Wild Healing LLC are for educational purposes only. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This information is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifies herbs as dietary supplements/food products, not medicines. Consult your healthcare provider before using any herbal supplements, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, have a medical condition, or take medications.