I’m sitting on the front porch with my daughter. I’m wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and a straw hat. My feet are bare, my pants rolled up to my knees, revealing the stunning brightness of my winter-white skin. I’m a little hot, but I know if I take off the sweatshirt, I’ll be a little cold. My daughter is wearing a T-shirt and shorts and swears she’s the perfect temperature. Our little black bulldog, Bea, is lying beside us in the sun, periodically panting in her sleep. It’s hard to believe that a little over a week ago school was canceled for almost an entire week because of extreme cold.
Usually we call this time “false spring,” but it’s falling later than usual this year, and after so much cold, it really feels like … well, like maybe it’s REAL spring.
Now, I don’t mean to suggest it won’t get cold again. Spring is always cold here on the Northern Plains. In fact, it’s usually cold until it’s unbearably hot — a change that happens right at the end of May.
No, the shift from winter to spring is not determined by the temperature. It’s not even the likelihood of snowstorms (there’s often more of those in April than any other month.) But there IS a difference in the air. After 15 winters here, I think I am starting to sense the imminent arrival of spring even if I can’t explain it.
A little context before I continue: While dealing with health issues over the last few years and researching anything and everything I could find about what the heck was going on with my body, I read a lot about the human nervous system and the difference between the brain and the mind.
Turns out your body receives more information than your mind formalizes into language because, while your brain is continuously processing all the sensory data your body receives as it moves through the world, only some of that information gets translated into conscious thoughts or even physical sensations. In other words, your body reports more information to your brain than your conscious mind documents. “Gut-feelings” — information that is not tied to language — fill some of the gaps, but here’s far more sensory data your brain doesn’t make conscious at all.
I’m vastly oversimplifying an incredibly complex and fascinating process to make a point. I spent most of my childhood in sheltered, climate-controlled environments. Daylight hours were spent in school rooms. All of the adults I knew worked in offices or similar interior spaces, and we socialized, ate and relaxed mostly indoors. The “outdoors” was the thing we passed through to get to another indoor place.
Not surprisingly, the beginning of spring was determined by a date on the calendar or maybe the arrival of the first daffodils if we remembered to look for them. Either way, other than visual clues and the occasional whiff of damp soil, my mind was not translating much data from my body into stories to explain the change of seasons because not only did I not have much access to those sensations, nothing in my day-to-day life was signaling to my brain that that was important information to share with my conscious mind.
Meanwhile, current scientific breakthroughs are catching up to the ancestral and indigenous wisdom that all humans used to have access to — namely, that plants, rocks, other animals, even the dirt beneath our feet are all generating energy and vibrations that our bodies can sense and also respond to without our conscious knowledge. Put more poetically: We are in wordless conversations with all that surrounds us.
Sitting in the sun with my daughter, I’m certain my body knows things my mind doesn’t yet. Perhaps my body senses the sap beginning to run inside the cottonwood trees next to the porch or the seeds beginning to awaken in the soil beside it.
And, if I need any extra validation, there’s the sudden honking of geese overhead. They are experiencing the same sensations I am — if it hasn’t arrived yet, spring is close!
