To Everything, a Season

First published in the print column, ‘The Nature of Things.’

Presently, there’s been a resurgence of a particular sickness impacting the lives of millions of people, worldwide. Supposedly not related to Covid, or any of its variants (unlike the price of lumber, the cost of food, and the shortage of people willing to work) the effects of this disease are potentially devastating. Symptoms include a flushed face, increased heart rate, appetite loss, restlessness…and rampant daydreaming. Well-documented by poets for centuries, the disease, better-known by its common name, is Spring Fever.

Though I have not sought a medical professional to swab my brain cells via my nostrils, or draw blood from my arm to be tested, I’m pretty sure I have it. A serious case of it, in fact. 

Insidious as this illness is, it comes on rather slowly, so you don’t really notice at first. I did start chewing my nails, and I was waking up earlier, but that whole time change thing always throws me for a few weeks, so I easily shrugged it off. 

Looking back though, I now see there was a point, early on, where I did begin to develop disturbing impulsive urges: scouring seed catalogs, composing page after page of elaborate projects needing urgent attention (the moment the weather would allow); supply lists and the re-working of my budget, over and over to accommodate the necessary remodeling of my entire home and yard. 

Then I began to lose time. Long hours, lost—days even—to Pinterest scrolling, Youtube video bingeing, Google “research.” From permaculture and food forests, to potager plots and pollinator habitats, I ingested enough DIY details to make my own space station from wood pallets. And it all seemed totally reasonable. Absolutely do-able. 

From the comfort of my living room, cup of tea within easy reach, laptop screen glowing with promise and a trusty notebook at hand, as recent as last week, I felt fit as a fiddle; happy as a lark. I still had no idea I was in the absolute throes of affliction until a sputtering gasp of winter’s dying breath delivered a heavy coat of slushy snow to my yard. This abrupt derailment of my perfectly planned spring project schedule sent me into a complete tailspin. That’s when I knew for sure I’d been infected; I had the Fever.

Though I’ve suffered the Fever many times—almost every year of my adult life—it always comes as somewhat of a surprise when I recognize, all over, once again, as if for the very first time, the onslaught of symptoms and their disruption to my overall constitution. It seems there’s no such thing as immunity, not for me any way. 

It is well documented that animals and humans track seasons by measuring the length of days through an internal biological clock called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). In mammals, this “clock” sits in the hypothalamus and monitors light through a pathway to the retina, conveying information about day length to the pineal gland. This pea-size gland, tucked at the base of the cerebrum, controls the secretion of melatonin, dubbed the sleep hormone because it is only released in the dark or in dim light. The duration of melatonin release changes with nocturnal length, which is longest during winter. And it has been thought that our increased energy in the spring months is somehow linked to the decreased duration of melatonin production, due to shorter nights.

So, since Spring Fever is a direct result of nature’s influence upon our more primal nature, it stands to reason we should look to nature for the cure. Turns out, this isn’t exactly a new idea.

Sixth-century Chinese philosopher and writer Lao Tzu believed whole-heartedly that most of what is wrong in human life stems from a failure to live in accordance with nature. In one text he says, “nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” And like the changing of the leaves in the fall, or the flowers that emerge from seeds deep underground, we are reminded that so many things in life happen on their own schedule—like grieving, gaining wisdom, or developing a new relationship.

Our envy, our rage, our manic ambition, our frustrated sense of entitlement, all of it stems from our failure to live as nature suggests we should—with the strength of mountains, the resilience of trees and the cheerfulness of flowers, or the patient, determination of water, whose gentle persistence has the power to reshape stone.

So I take a deep breath and trust that, like the changing of the seasons, this Fever, too, will pass. Warm weather will arrive in earnest, the trees will once again fill with leaves, and the time will come soon enough for me to get elbow-deep in the dirt.