The Unbearable Beauty of Spring

meditations on our place in nature

I find it very difficult to write in spring. I need a certain degree of calm to write, some pockets of it, and find spring overwhelming. In Greece it comes suddenly, flamboyant, heady, dazzling. There is no slow snow melt, measured warming, or cautious growth. It arrives from one day to the next, temperatures rising by a steep ten, or more degrees overnight. You fall asleep in winter and wake up in spring. And it arrives with a full ensemble, no half measures. As though on cue, as the flowers bloom, the migrating birds arrive, the sky’s blue turns electric. Even clouds seem whiter, lighter, faster, as though they are the winter clouds’ playful offspring.

Daphne smelling a poppy

I do most of my thinking around writing in the park where I walk every morning, a large area which is mostly forest, with sections of almond trees and vines. For most of the year, it is a relatively peaceful space, especially at dawn when I venture out with my dog Daphne, and is ideal for putting my thoughts in order, allowing the distillation of ideas so crucial to writing. In spring it all changes. The entire ground disappears under a sea of wild flowers in some areas, from mallow, daisies and poppies, to strawflowers, cistus and St. john’s-wort. Everywhere you look there are pops of red, yellow, purple, pink, floating over a bed of the brightest green. It is beautiful, and for the first few days it can feel like magic is at work. Everyone’s mood lifts and greetings in the park are all about how spring has arrived, as though everything will be ok from now on. And for a few days everything does seem better, more manageable.

But then it can become unbearable. Not because it becomes less beautiful; it becomes unbearable because there is a melancholy attached to this kind of beauty, borne out of its transient nature and of the contrast, the way it can throw the rest of life into sharp relief. As the park is situated in Athens, the real world is always pushing against its walls, the noise of traffic, of sirens and the hum of urban life always in the near distance. The coexistence of these two different realities can be unsettling, inviting questions that are hard to answer. I find myself wondering how such beauty can exist when there is so much suffering in the world. What of those who can’t enjoy it for whatever reason? I don’t think I’m alone in this and although it doesn’t stop me from appreciating the beauty, it does make me want to understand the complex relationship we sometimes have with it.

Perhaps a partial answer can be found in the contrasts spring makes more pronounced, especially in our relationship to the natural world, that are more obvious in urban settings, but exist everywhere. Contrasts that contain a certain degree of accountability, or guilt, perhaps, and urge us to ask ourselves how we can exist in the world the way we do and still be given the gift of spring; the sense that we are not deserving of it, are not fitting custodians of such a beautiful, fragile world. Thinking about it seems counterintuitive, as though trying to find an answer by using our analytical and egocentric minds, the one aspect that separates us from so much of the natural world, will only make the contrast, the distance, greater. Maybe it is again to nature we should turn to for the answer.

In a Poetry Unbound podcast¹ on the poetry of James Wright, host and poet Pádraig Ó Tuama talks about Wright’s poem A Blessing. The poem describes how Wright and a friend were walking one dusk in Minnesota, when two ponies approached them. Describing the encounter, Wright says how the ponies could ‘hardly contain their happiness’ at seeing the two walkers, and how he wanted to hold the slenderer one in his arms, because she had walked over to him and nuzzled his left hand. Finding the innocence and tenderness of the pony’s nature almost painful, Wright says in the penultimate lines of the poem “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break”. Ó Tuama considers that “you can see how beauty can sometimes be almost wounding. It can almost break you. You mightn’t know how to contain it. It’s that unbearable lightness. And how can the world, a world that James Wright knows can be cruel with war and abandonment, and lonely, how can this world be so beautiful?”

But just as there is melancholy to be found in the intersection of beauty and suffering, there is consolation in the very aspect that can throw it into relief. As directly as Wright invites the reader to consider the tension between humans and the beauty of the natural world, he immediately offers the remedy after the line break:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Wright conveys the difficult relationship we have with the natural world and provides us with the solution. He is inviting us to look to nature to find what is meaningful, lean into our more vulnerable and tender aspects, or simply appreciate the small gestures and wonders that make life tolerable.

But perhaps there is another, even more profound lesson to be learned from Wright’s poem and the beauty of spring: that we need to relax our grip on our humanness, even if just a little, try to step outside the centre we imagine ourselves occupying in the world, a centre in which we’ve placed a pedestal for ourselves from which we observe what we consider to be ours.

This year I’ve tried to do just that. In the past, I’ve always felt anxious as May Day approaches, horrified at the thought that people from all over the city will descend on the park, the only such relatively wild space in Athens, and trample all over the tender, fragile daisies and poppies, as they do every year, leave rubbish behind, cut thousands of wildflowers, only to discard the ones that have withered by the end of the day. But this year, I realised that part of my problem was that I felt responsible for it all, as though what I absurdly and self-righteously believe to be my more enlightened way of thinking and living gave me some kind of authority. But isn’t it precisely this kind of thinking that leads us to believe we have rights over nature? That somehow it is up to us to decide what happens to it? Maybe we need to think a little this way, if we are ever going to come up with ways to protect it, but finding a balance between our desire to control, our ability to protect and the distance we need to keep from nature in order to do so is a challenge we so far seem incapable of meeting.

For now, I’m simply trying to step back a little. To accept that spring just happens, just like summer, autumn and winter. I remind myself that if spring brings so much emotion, so many questions to the surface it is because it is when nature is at its most evident. Because it reminds us of regeneration, of hope, as though with each spring we are given a new opportunity to get it right. But nature and its beauty are always there, just in different, more subtle forms. The transient and fragile beauty of spring simply reminds us that we need to do more, but do it differently, do it better. Step outside the centre. Come down from our pedestal.

Spring is not about us. It’s simply nature doing what it does. Nature does not exist, does not do what it does for us; flowers bloom and the sky turns brighter despite us. We are not the centre of this world, as much as we might believe we are. What we should be trying to figure out is how to be part of it. As James Wright so poignantly suggests, to step outside ourselves and turn to blossom. Perhaps this is why the beauty of spring is unbearable: because we haven’t figured out yet how to be part of it all without destroying it.

1. Poetry Unbound Podcast, On Being Project, hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama, James Wright, A Blessing, https://onbeing.org/programs/james-wright-a-blessing/