Spring Singing with Birds

“Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all.” ― Emily Dickinson

My heart leaps with joy at every sunshine filled morning; the last ecstatic warbles and trills of the returning dawn chorus are drifting through my tightly closed curtains and then, as I realise that once again the sun is shining, suddenly I'm SO HAPPY to be awake! This is in stark contrast to winter mornings, where all things considered, I prefer to be asleep. Spring is springing, hurrah!

If you look among the trees you can see the first small signs arrive as Hawthorn calls forth the green.

Everyone is busy already. I've always wondered what the tapping was in the trees along our lane, It's definitely not a woodpecker, their drumming, hammering peck is much faster than this and far, far louder. They live in the valley below us and two of them are making sweet woodpecker music this spring pretty much non-stop. I digress - I knew it was a small bird repeatedly pecking or banging something but I didn't know what.

I'm pretty sure he's a Nuthatch and what he's banging is a hazel nut.

There are secret words, sacred words, full of love and honouring that I feel on my tongue when the sun comes out, they fill up my mouth and burst out in a morning song of happiness that joins the birds in praising the morning. It had rained so relentlessly for so interminably long that I had forgotten that the sun could ever come out. I had forgotten to remember spring, to hope for spring. This morning it felt as though even the trees were opening their mouths to pour out ecstatic song.

They seemed to be mimicking birds in other ways too... can you see that? It was even more beak and eye like in the flesh.

The Spring Equinox approaches, the year is uncoiling, unwinding itself from the last drips of a wet winter's sleep towards the day when day and night are or equal length and spring, unleashed, gallops forwards towards summer.  We stand in the place between the dark half and the light half of the year, between down and up, between snowdrops and daffodils, the place of both.

Much of the yellow is already out; there have been primroses lifting their delicate yellow faces to the sky since late December, Daffodils and Lesser Celandine since February (not so unusual) and I saw a dandelion today!

Happy Spring Equinox, may your uncoiling and unwinding bring you joy.