As we approach the end of the hibernation season, an aroma of rebirth has flooded the streets of Kingston. The sun is shining, the temperature has reached double digits, and life has come again. I am usually drawn to listen to Bluebells by Mitchell Rowland or Margo Guryan’s Love Songs, and flounder around the city I’ve lived in for the past two years, watching it come alive. No longer would I walk past the dull, grey buildings that blur together with the cloudy sky, but I could marvel at the joyful people on the streets, admiring the transformative power of the colour green and the glimmering light reflecting on the lake. The warmer days should act as a reminder that there is a life to be lived, yet that revelation has not dragged me out of bed and out of the house.
Spring often brings forth a sense of renewal, an awakening from the cold months spent inside. In seasons past, I woke up on a bright and sunny day with a burning urgency to be one of those productive, grind mindset, motivated people and get my life in order. I would make myself some matcha, grab my journal and get to work. So naturally, I was looking forward to this feeling of starting again. No more days spent bet rotting, and nights scrolling away, watching the Rizzler’s newest adventure; it was almost time for my own! Only to find that although everyone had seemed to change their outlook on life with the possibility of wearing shorts, my apathetic attitude had not melted away with the snow.
I was still the same person who did not want to go outside and join the happy people of Kingston. The sun’s warmth would not dare disturb the universe’s plan for me. It was hard for me to forget who I had been during the winter, hard for me to find the courage to switch gears. As someone who suffers from depression, I often find solace in isolation, trapping myself in my room and staring at the several posters of Harry Styles, which strangely stare back. It’s always hard to pull myself out of space. Knowing that this repeated pattern of getting better, then worse, then better again has grown tiresome and makes me feel stagnant. So I turned to William Sieghart’s The Poetry Pharmacy, in a desperate plea to blossom once again.Â
This was not my first time referring to poetry when I needed guidance, but it was Sieghart’s book that taught me sometimes all you need is a change in perspective from poems written by people who have been where you are. Philip Larkin’s poem, “The Trees”, captured my attention earlier this month, and has stuck with me since.Â
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.Â
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in the rings of grain.Â
Yet still the unresting castles threshÂ
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
Larkin here expresses the wonder of that extraordinary potential for change, seen through the trees changing through the seasons. Similar to the trees, we too grow and change, and will be fully alive again. Sieghart proposes that “we will always have that chance to be reborn into positivity and change” (Sieghart 32). These words truly changed the way I felt about being stagnant, reminding me to have hope and to trust in the changing seasons. We will bloom and transform; it will happen. We must begin, afresh, afresh, afresh!