Water to Wood

The intelligence of beginning

For months, the landscape has been subterranean quiet. Bare trees and quiet seeds, as life, withdrawn from its visible expression, has been waiting in its own kind of darkness, with very little evidence of where it might go from here.

Then, incrementally and almost imperceptibly, the planet tilts, the sun grows in light and strength, and the whole of nature feels as if something could well begin.

Beneath winter’s deep rest, the soil has been warming in the new sun, causing the resting Water to rise and seeds to swell with the stirring of it. Roots yawn and awaken in the dark, and sap stirs kundalini-like in the belly of the great trees. Summer’s blossoms are shifting from dream to form somewhere way, way down.

Meanwhile, above ground, even in the invisibility of the process, the great change can be felt and named as we nod to our neighbours across the grocery aisle or comment on the warmth of the day to a stranger in the park.

Wind.
Thunder.
Rain.
Movement.

Birds busy themselves repairing nests and feasting on dragonflies, now suddenly swelling in the air. Green shoots erupt as bright yellow dandelions, the timelords of Spring, here to let us know it’s game on. The world hasn’t just become warm. The entire behavioural field has changed, bringing with it restlessness, sexual energy, creativity, irritability and spring cleaning. Leaving something, beginning something, moving something.

Dormant life is waking up. The Crone opens her eyes, renewed as the Maiden, stretching awake in her bed of moss, jasmine and spring violets.

In Five Element theory, Winter belongs to Water and Spring to Wood. Winter is ultimate Yin, the season in which life descends, conserves and gathers itself, while Spring is expressive, expansive and evolutionary. It is Yin becoming Yang.

Over Winter, the seed is contained, resisting any urge to become its future self in a mature and intelligent restraint. Its Waters have gathered enough wisdom to know there is something about remaining in the dark until the time is right, and that one warm afternoon does not a summer make. A healthy Winter speaks from intimacy with the unknowable future, gifting us the capacity to stay in delight with the mystery rather than rush towards the answer.

Fear knows these wintery halls too. At its essence, fear, the emotion most associated with Winter, is an exquisite listening that organises us inward and downward, granting the discernment to know when it is truly safe to move. Balanced fear is the capacity to remain with uncertainty long enough to discern impulse from readiness.

Left unchecked or unbalanced by circumstance, fear freezes us there in the deep, holding us vigilant at its threshold, avoiding the decision, exercising an endless and exhausting caution, even as we know that surely this cannot be right.

But the determination of Water’s enduring flow means that, no matter what, readiness will eventually arrive. And the shape of that liberation will be commensurate with its ingredients.

Winter’s Water will discover the seed and Spring’s Wood will accept the responsibility of becoming it. What has been hidden, conserved, feared, dreamed, or gestating must move, must choose.

This is where the restlessness of Spring, the movement from Water into Wood, carries us into the territory of Wood’s emotional realm, anger, as it mobilises energy towards its necessary expression. Anger, in this way, is profoundly directional, moving us towards something or away from it, drawing a boundary, making a decision, supplying the force required to meet the obstacle, and so to continue on.

As Water would have it.

A green shoot pushing through compacted earth holds no grievance with the soil, nor will it negotiate endlessly with the pebble in its path. Instead it cracks the pavement, breaches the shell, moves around whatever is immovable and reaches until it finds support. “I am going this way”, says Spring, and there is something beautifully uncomplicated in such pure assertion.

For Wood, movement is everything, yet when it cannot find an intelligent pathway, that expanding energy can turn in on itself, becoming frustration, irritability, resentment, rigidity, aggression, even rage. In this way, frustration is growth meeting obstruction, and anger its ally, guiding it towards the life attempting to grow through it.

So what wants expression in you this Spring? What boundary have you reached? Is this hot, angry place evolution that is blocked, or impatient growth whose time has not yet come?

Early spring requires we exhale against the urgency. Returning to Water, whose intelligence remains to parent the folly of a youthful Wood by giving it depth, contact with the higher eye, and sturdy roots beneath its effervescent reaching. Without it, spring’s whirling dervish loses its relationship with what is true.

This is meditation alongside movement, listening alongside planning, recovery alongside creation, silence alongside expression. Direction needs the flexibility to know where it is growing, and the responsiveness to pivot fast with both obstacle and opportunity as required.

There is thunder in the earth here in early Spring. It doesn’t need us to make anything happen, at least not yet, but it does beckon us to notice the tiny beginnings and the tender stirrings alike. To pull back from new moon vision boarding and the effort we expend to create, and instead to offer ourselves to what is already here, asking to live.

Winter is an apprenticeship in listening. Spring comes to give direction to its storytelling.

Don’t invent the Spring. Listen deeply enough that when life begins moving again, you are ready to move with its flow — wherever that might take you.