The Lightness.

On Wednesday the sun came out and shone all day long. I was able to go for my walk without my winter coat, without my wellies, without my scarf and hat and gloves…shedding the layers of winter one by one. Oh, the joy of that lightness.

We walked in a place I love, an old forgotten piece of land. English bluebells and wild garlic and wood celandines that return there each year, faithful to the soil. It’s the only place I know locally that has wild meadowsweet in the summer months and water mint growing thick along the river. I love it. I hope they never build on it. I send my love down through my body, my feet, and into the land.

We had walked across the sloping meadow bordered by a shallow but ancient woodland, the air just beginning to carry that green, peppery smell of wild garlic. As the land closed in around us, the birdsong growing louder and louder, we turned off the path into a small clearing of scrubby land and low grey rocks, the river running quietly along one side.

There on one of the rocks, lying warm in the spring sunshine, was the silky curl of a snake skin.

At first I thought it was a scrap of something pale caught on the stone. But as I stepped closer I saw it for what it was, delicate, perfect, almost translucent.

Somewhere nearby, that beautiful wild creature had emerged from his winter sleep and twisted out of it, into a newer, fresher, brighter skin. He had quite literally shed his old self and had left it there in the sunshine, on a rock…he knew he didn’t need it anymore…snakes know about beginning again.

I knew how he felt that spring morning, walking only in my t-shirt, blinded by the light, deafened by the birds, floored (each and every time) by the beauty of spring. The buds beginning to split their tight green cases, the celandines opening their small yellow suns to the light…

Spring does this to all living things. Twisting irresistibly out of old skins, laying them down, turning fully to the sun.

I wanted to take it home with me, but I knew it wasn’t mine to have. It was only mine to see. To heed. To witness.

The season turns, the birds sing, the snake sheds its skin, the bulbs push blindly, madly, hopefully upwards through the warming soil and we all stand together, twisting into our new skins, turning them towards the sun.

It hurts at first to leave things behind…but oh, the lightness!