Denise Levertov, “Annunciation”
 
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
 
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.
 
She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.
 
____________________
 
 
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
 
 
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
 
____________________
 
 
She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child–but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.
 
Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
  only asked
a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
the astounding ministry she was offered:
 
to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power–
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love–
 
but who was God.
 
 
This was the moment no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
 
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
 
____________________
 
 
She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’
Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.
-Denise Levertov, from A Door in the Hive, copyright 1989 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Bloodaxe Books, UK.
 
 
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. As there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.”
-Martha Graham, in a quote remembered by Agnes de Mille
 
POETIC THEMES
            Of all the major Christian holidays, the day marking the visitation of the angel upon Mary is the only one centering around a woman. Levertov’s insidious first line: “We know the scene.” Oh, and how.
            Let me just say now: to wrestle with this poem is hard. Really hard. It’s a Christian poem celebrating the ostensible power of consent in the idea of a virgin mother. The costs of this myth, with its violent regime of white female purity, have been catastrophic—part of the weaponry of colonialism that has left so.many.people.destroyed. Lingering with this poem uses more parts of me than I’m comfortable using.
            I want to join Levertov in disrupting the narrative of Mary’s “meek obedience,” in favor of the notion that God “did not enter her without consent.” I really want to. I want to believe that “She was free / to accept or to refuse,” and I wholly agree that this freedom is a “choice / integral to humanness.” But y’all… it feels like such a stretch, in spite of the beauty of her languaging.
            An ethic of toughness shames us for turning away “in a wave of weakness” from what we might not want to take on. Levertov associates “no” with despair and the relief of the ordinary. To blunder through the hard questions about power and yielding, we could revisit our own stories of pressured consent. After all, most of us would respond in the affirmative to Levertov’s central question: “Aren’t there annunciations / of one sort or another / in most lives?” How could we design some fresh strategies for imagining openness, receptivity, and the power to take in otherness?
            Levertov reconfigures Mary’s consent to bring something sacred into the world as the power of creativity. The visitation of the divine is muse-like, an instantiation of literal inspiration: taking in spirit, breathing it in, to gestate it and birth something new. There is something so soothing about this reconfiguration of openness. It’s a recognizable, gender-neutral experience of being “opened…utterly” by a form of power that is distinctly outside of us - "other.”
            Speaking of “courage unparalleled,” I’d like to bring Martha Graham to the stage. Isn’t it ironic that the movement legacy of this non-procreative woman is the contraction? Creativity requires radical openness, for Graham as for Levertov. Maybe we could divorce the idea of creation from actual pregnancy and childbirth, to reconfigure springtime themes that inhere in the Annunciation. Mary is known, in Christian thought, as the Queen Bee, the ubiquitous symbol of fertility, rebirth, and a transition from rest to work. Listening for the buzzing of the divine voice in our ears might sound like Graham’s “vitality” or “life force” or “quickening that is translated through you into action.” It’s a call to listen, a call to “keep the channel open,” “clearly and directly,” to stay “open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.” This is, for Graham, the divine visitation. Graham and Levertov lead us to consider what we are being asked to open ourselves to.              
           What is the work we are being called to undertake? Sometimes the call to create appears as Levertovian “moments when roads of light and storm / open from darkness,” and other times it appears as an itch that needs scratching, Graham’s “queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest.” This is more like the feeling of something waiting to get free of us. Either way, if we don’t respond to the call of our work in the world, we are given the stakes. Levertov’s assertion that “the gates close, the pathway vanishes” is echoed by Graham: “it will not exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it.” This is an angle that configures creativity from a process of output to an art of input. Perceiving the generativeness of the spring in this way draws the focus away from producing or amassing resources, and toward openness and receptivity.
            I want to witness Queen Bee Mary as a figure who reinvigorates time-worn clichés about fertility with a courageous openness to our work in the world. I really do. But it’s not easy to neutralize the painful associations that attend a figure who has caused a world of harm, even for someone like me whose religious upbringing didn’t feature Mary. But if we can listen for the divine buzz, maybe with practice we might come to witness openness and receptivity with new eyes. Perhaps it could even help revise the idea of a “work ethic” as a collaborative, celebratory promiscuity: pollinating and cross-pollinating sweet, sticky stuff to spread more life around!
 
 
PRACTICE
            I began offering humming as a closing practice in my somatics classes before I learned that it soothed the vagus nerve. I just knew it was helpful to bridge the gap between the quiet mindfulness practices and the way we show up in the world. Opening eyes, greeting one another, and making sounds in the space seemed to help us all import the qualities we were cultivating into the rest of our lives and interactions. So I settled on humming together—no wrong notes, no scripted rhythm, just humming for the length of our exhale and then starting again.
            Yoga calls this practice “bee breath” (brahmani pranayama). Much of the power of Sanskrit, particularly the “Om,” is attributed to vibration, and when we hum, we actually feel it vibrating the skull, the sinus cavity, and the brain—our second womb. To summon our bee powers speaks to all the themes I’ve been playing with here. It’s pretty empowering to watch, over time, as a practice builds our capacity to calm our inner state, sedimenting a fresh foundation from which to put something new out there. Over time, the clean categories of input and output get kerfuffled even further: the quiet buzz of a hum is a form of output that, when removed, makes us aware of all that inhabits the silence that we didn’t take in before. When the avant-garde composer John Cage first entered an anechoic chamber (a room designed to deaden sound), he identified two distinct concurrent sounds, and the engineer told him that one corresponded to the nervous system, the other to blood flow. This can be a whole practice unto itself. 
            Would you be willing to test out humming, perhaps at different registers and tones, as a way of clearing fresh inroads to the brain? Then you might pause in the stillness and listen to the white noise until you hear not just the static buzz, but a lower register, like a bottom-end bass tone. It can be deeply centering to toggle the attention between the bass and the “treble,” if that’s what you want to call the static sound. It can also allow for an experiential reconfiguring of what’s inside and what’s outside the soma. Deep listening is a practice of opening up to the messages that might be reaching out for us. Might you then differently hear the messages reaching out for you? What else in your life helps clear the pathway for visitation, inspiration, communion? Are there other ways you might cultivate the openness and receptivity that invite spirit in?

​Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed”
You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
Robert Frost, “Putting in the Seed” (This poem is in the public domain)
 
 
Octavio Paz, “Proem”
At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
  the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;
  the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;
  the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;
  the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,
  for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;
  the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;
  the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
  the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
  the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
  the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
  the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.
Syllables seeds.  
“Proem” by Octavio Paz, translated by Eliot Weinberger, from The Selected Poems 1957-1987, copyright ©1986 by Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
 
 
Muriel Rukeyser, “Elegy in Joy” (excerpt)
We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.
“Elegy in Joy” by Muriel Rukeyser, from Elegies, copyright ©1949 by Muriel Rukeyster. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 
 
 
POETIC THEMES 
            The ancient Babylonians and Persians marked the turning of the year sometime around the vernal equinox. In my neck of the woods, at least in the moment of global warming in which this book was written, around now is generally considered a safe time to plant seeds, especially if you are looking to harvest edible things in the summer. But there are many ways to plant a seed, as these poems illustrate.
            Frost’s “Putting in the Seed” represents gardening as solitary labor through which “Love burns” (his wife making him dinner is not configured this way). The petals he’s fingering are pretty suggestive: “not so barren quite, / Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea.” Hm. “Putting” (an odd, neutral choice of verbs for this otherwise sexy poem) seeds into the ground is seen to be the demonstration of his “springtime passion for the earth.” He is such a “slave” to passion that he may or may not decide to come eat the dinner prepared for him. His wife is, however, invited to the early birth, when the “sturdy seedling” will shoulder its way into the world.
            Contrast this to Octavio Paz’s expansive vision of planting seeds. A poem about the action of writing poetry as an analogy for seed-planting would seem to point to a certain self-reflexivity. The horizon expands and expands further in the far-reaching scope of what poetry can be: vertigo cliff-walk of bodies, speech, and death. Words parachuting onto the page are depicted in Biblical proportions of sorrow and despair, which would seem to aggrandize the poet. But then, admitting this “idolatry of the self” is itself a kind of desecration. And in this play of expansion and contraction, the small self of the poet is dissipated into something much larger. Poetic creation is figured here in terms of destruction, before anything new can be possible: epithets are beheaded, rules and commandments are set on fire. Even the poem’s nostalgic homage to the ancient world of Plato and Epicurus forces open the Western ancient world to include the gardens of Netzahualcoyotl.
              Language isn’t configured as the poet’s spawn, a product of his labor pains, but instead as something wild, set free, far beyond and outside of him. Verbs migrate with “wings and claws,” nouns are “bony and full of roots,” language is a sea of waves. The mystery of creation isn’t an act to be claimed or owned here. For Frost, the middle of the sonnet holds the love act that breeds its creation: “Love burns through the [capitalized act of] Putting in the Seed.” But love only emerges at the end of Paz’s poem, so mysterious as to be invisible, unheard, and unspoken. The involuted line “love in love” comes back to the final, solitary, italicized line: “Syllables seeds.” The poem created, for Paz, is what comes before, like a proem. The love for creation seeds, in turn, more love.
            Is it far-fetched to perceive in “Elegy in Joy” echoes of the watery despair, engendering love, roots and flame of “Proem”? Rukeyser’s articulations of a liberal politics might owe just as much to Octavio Paz as her poetry does. I’ve only dipped a toe in it, so I’m not the one to say. But in the foreword to her translations of his early poetry, she describes finding in his work a fusion of politics and art: “In coming to the poems of the young Octavio Paz, I found that voice of the meeting-place for which many of us were looking in those years. Meeting-place of fever and the cold eye, in a passion which could hold together with his own arms the flying apart of his own time.” She describes, in the foreword, how translating him transformed her. Her grace and humility in admitting her limitations, not being of Mexican descent, exemplify a keen awareness of the messiness of intersubjectivity ahead of its time. She recounts her awkward “stumbling” through the task of bringing the full range of meanings, carrying Nahuatl as well as Mexican nuances. She confesses to having made many “mistakes in my frenzy and ignorance,” and speaks directly to appropriative violence: “…the traces of my attempt to move from this poetry toward an English poem have left wounds, scars where we need healing.” She closes the foreword by restating her conviction that “The translator must be exposed to this extent; fully, that is”; ending not with her own conclusions, but with Carlos Fuentes’ description of Paz’s “lucid expression of Mexican tragedy.”
            But back to “Elegy in Joy”! Rukeyser’s elegies were her response to the confusion of World-War-II-era America. They are part of an oeuvre that, like Paz’s, wrestles with the nitty-gritty of a commitment to pacifism in the context of savage political realities. And this poem is the last of the elegies. It is the work of a mature poet and anti-fascist activist, no longer naive to the ways of the world. As such, this poem swims in grief, aware of its own limitation in offering nourishment or answers to wide-eyed children in wartime. Still, it isn’t an elegy for joy, but an elegy in joy. Like a small raft on the flowing river of despair, joy persists in new beginnings. The “green tree of grace” gives a blessing in the form of a seed. The seed here is configured as a metaphor standing for new beginnings, of whatever kind, which we are called to nourish and which in turn promise nourishment. Anything sullied, tainted, made toxic by ordinary human cruelty, can be recreated: “Not all things are blest, but the / seeds of all things are blest.”
             After spending “Years over wars and an imagining of peace,” the nowness of the present moment is the seed for peace, an instantiation of “fierce pure life.” All of us collectively caring about the broken world, “which is many wishes flaming together,” holds the possibility for our “expiation journey / toward peace.” The first word of the poem is, after all, WE. Frost’s labor of love in sowing a seed creates new life, configured as progeny. Paz’s poem is the creative seed that generates a love so expansive that the smallness of humanity disappears in it. For Rukeyser, Love itself appears to be the nourishing seed that "gives us ourselves": we are recreated in and through the very notion of beginning anew. The blessing of “this instant of love” makes possible “new techniques for the healing of the wound, / and the unknown world.” And then the magnificent final line about the reach and import of each mortal incarnation, as far-flung as any surrealistic sweep of Paz’s imagination: “One life, or the faring stars.”
 
 
PRACTICE
            The most literal way of exploring your relation to seed-planting would be… um… to plant an actual seed. Frost’s poem is the most grounded in embodied movement and earthy detail. You could come back to earth by feeling the dirt under your fingernails. Or you might instead plant an emblematic talisman, a meaningful object of some kind, referencing the magic of something you’re ready to birth this spring. You could mark it with a stone, dig it up at the end of the summer, wash it off, and see what has come into the world through you. Or you could render the action of planting a seed metaphorically, as Paz does with the analogy of writing, through some creative act. It seems very fitting to mark the new year by generating something new, and perhaps it could renew your love for painting, or journaling, or dancing. Or you could “nourish beginnings” in Rukeyser’s way, through letting grace drop its seed in a single act of loving. Who needs you in this moment? How could you contribute to healing the world’s wound by reaching out to them in love?

William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All (by the road to the contagious hospital)"
I
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines--
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches--
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind--
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined--
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
 
By William Carlos Williams, from Selected Poems, copyright 1985 by the New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press, UK.
 
 
Jane Hirshfield, “Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me"  
The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.
Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.
For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.
The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.
I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.
Today, I woke without answer.
The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend
don’t despair of this falling world, not yet
didn’t it give you the asking
 
“Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me” © Jane Hirshfield, used by permission of the author, all rights reserved.
 
 
Jane Hirshfield, “Today, When I Could Do Nothing”
Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.
It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.
A morning paper is still an essential service.
I am not an essential service.
I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.
It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.
Then across the laptop computer—warm--
then onto the back of a cushion.
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?
It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.
Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom--
how is your life, I wanted to ask.
I lifted it, took it outside.
This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.
 
“Today, When I Could Do Nothing” © Jane Hirshfield, used by permission of the author, all rights reserved.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
           Thinking Feelingly begins with the first week of March. I have no idea where I actually started writing the book, but it wasn’t on March first (as convenient as it would be to start writing on what was New Year’s Day according to the old Roman calendar).
         When I started writing, it was with the intention of relearning how to analyze poetry, and new skills only emerged with practice. My first go-round for March week 1 was about William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All,” and its downward camera sweep from the inchoate sky, down through the muddy fields, and then further down to the underground roots and the life that is quickening there. I find in this poem the elemental movement Chinese medicine perceives in the spring: from water (chill, mud, wind, sky) to wood (as “one by one objects are defined” from vague “stuff” to the precise, stiff carrot leaf). I do feel this transition physically, emerging “sluggish and dazed” from winter but intuiting a kind of potential quickening somewhere deep inside. It’s kind of the perfect description of the beginning of a book, no?
            I’d love to use Williams’ neat camera sweep to describe the way I wrote the book: the dark, formless, introspective months of gestation yielding to action and disciplined doing! But y’all... creative work is never like that. Growing something new is a mess. It’s a muddy, bleary-eyed swing back and forth. Like the weather—one day we are all action, the next we are hunkered down with tea and hot pad. One day we get a glimpse of OurNextBoldMove and the next it’s mush again. The learning curve in writing these entries was steep, as I resisted the inclination to wrestle dissonance into neatness and tried instead to stay true to the limits of my own perceptive reach and my sensual reckoning with a poem’s overflow. The truth is always richer than the tidy anyway, and the actual progress of spring isn’t a clean transition from chaos to form. It’s kind of a mess.
            So I’d like to engage a different poem to start, one that speaks to the aims and intentions of starting something new, rather than clean and masterful execution. Jane Hirshfield’s poem for the New Year poses a question rather than answering it—the question this world is asking each one of us: “what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?” Instead of answering this question, the speaker builds an altar to it, bringing salt and postcards and stamps. Waking without answers to the daily question, admitting the limitations of the power to turn stone to apple and war to peace, the poet instead counts “what remains.” In doing so, the poem becomes, itself, the altar it describes. We could say of the poem what its final line says of the world: “didn’t it give you the asking.”
            I’d like to borrow Hirshfield’s question as the “thought from a friend” that this New Year’s Day “unpockets”: what can we make or do to create change in the world? We don’t yet need a perfect answer, and my book sure isn’t one. I tried to remain stubbornly open to the shifting modes of inquiry in writing and in rewriting entries as I find new poems or can’t afford to anthologize old ones. As a result, many entries contain within them the movement from familiar modes of close reading to stranger, more unwieldy ones. Maybe we could just be in this queer flux between mud and emergence, without concretizing what precisely we are growing just yet.
            But enough with the self-reflexive stuff! If you’re looking to define your own springtime action, Hirshfield has an equally forgiving poem about opening our spidey senses to the hunches from the world on what needs doing. She released “Today, When I Could Do Nothing” in the middle of the disorientation of Covid lockdown. Many of us had coffee, books, time, a garden, and “silence enough to fill cisterns.” And yet we, unlike Hirshfield’s unfrightened ant, weren’t doing so hot. If we weren’t one of the brave fighters on the front line, if we could “contribute nothing beyond staying distant from [our] own kind,” we had time aplenty to scan around for the small action. Saving an ant, who may not have been saved otherwise! These lines mark the sacredness of the small action—the local, the humble, the compassion-driven effort. That truth sticks around longer than any pandemic could. What do you do when you feel powerless? Check in on your mom. Get groceries for your sick friend. Write that letter to your city official. Pet your dog. Challenge a hometown acquaintance to talk through some racist shit. Oh, and pet your dog some more.
            But/And! Some hours need to be devoted to letting the creative field lie fallow so it can birth new life. We can only generate solutions to the mess of our world by returning to the ant’s pace for a time. If we are gentle with ourselves and our pacing, merciful in defining the blossoming thing within us that could maybe help this planet of ours, we just might find an answer one of these spring mornings. The human hand that moved the ant “through swiftness and air” is contrasted to the insect’s own slow progress, from newspaper to laptop (warm!) to cushion—“moving steadily because that is what it could do.” The poem was and is an invitation to move steadily, deliberately, with attention to warmth and ink and softness. Our contribution may just be a small thing, but together small things can carry the heaviest loads.
 
PRACTICE
             Maybe you could Just.Plain.Slow.Down. Simply fetching coffee at an ant’s pace is incredibly instructive. Or if you’re drawn to the messy springtime transition from underground stirrings toward form and structure, you might embody it! Seated or in slow movement, try exploring a dividing line at the waist, where upper-body movements are isolated from the stillness of the lower body, as though it were buried underground. Attend to the specific angles in your orientation to space—to the edges and corners of the room around you, ceiling, floor, and furniture. The amygdala likes to know where it stands, so to speak, and will be helped by clear, symmetrical, determined planting of the feet, legs, and hips. 
             Perhaps, in your breathing, you might embody the elemental up/down play of spring more subtly. Picture your underground lower body gripping down on the exhale and then inhaling the stem of the spine, chest, and skull upward, as though everything above the waist were reaching up for the sun. Perhaps close by visualizing one small action from your week, tantamount to ant-saving. It’s only a beginning. You could just remain open to hunches from the world around you about what your winter hibernation might yield this spring, what might be coming into definition for you. How could you take action to give it what it needs to emerge?