Words: Clare Dwyer Hogg
Image: Barney Beech
I’m back this week to the landscape where I spent my childhood. It’s beautiful, and very different to the urban environment I stride though in my adult life. When I’m here, I know what I miss when I’m not. It’s the feeling of being in uninterrupted elements, looking out at trees and sky with little other noise aside from wind or rain.
I arrived just as the clocks sprang forward, and the longer evenings gave me hints of good memories: dinners outside, rope-swings into dusk, that kind of thing. But I also caught myself, because I had expected the garden to be full of buds and colour, and it wasn’t. In my mind, you see, it was spring. The clocks had gone forward. In other words: officially spring. That means bulbs bursting, green on the trees, foliage covering branches. I couldn’t see them.
It seems that my mental season-calculator is ahead of the real seasons. Yes, I can spot some daffodils and signs of emergent green here and there, but the branches on most of the trees are still stark against a silver sky. The undergrowth is carpeted with the damp dead leaves from autumn. The rampaging wind gives the air the feel of winter. If I did not know that spring was on its journey up through the soil, I would not believe it.
Clockwork is different to the processes of real life. It sounds so obvious when articulated. But I really expected more growth, just because, in my mind, it was spring. Yet the scene before me – a garden waiting to be sprung into verdancy – didn’t fit. It didn’t fit, that is, if the seasons are supposed to obey the clock.
Knowing very well how life goes through different seasons – one time for this, another for that – and having learned the lesson (sometimes a bitter one), I know my idea of the right time isn’t always right
It is probably in no way coincidental that this week my thoughts were preoccupied with my own timeline. I was measuring the growth and progression of certain areas of my life against the clock. They weren’t matching. I was perplexing my thoughts into trying to figure out why they weren’t, and how they could. This, despite knowing very well (mostly with hindsight) about how life goes through different seasons – one time for this, another for that – and having learned the lesson (sometimes a bitter one, and, again, mostly with hindsight) that my idea of the right time isn’t always right.
If I didn’t know that spring was on its journey up through the soil, I wouldn’t believe it was coming. Yet I believe it is coming, because I know that the soil and all the plants it contains hold within them the capacity and promise of growth. And that if the soil and plants are tended, fed, watered, given the best conditions, the growth will come. I know this, and I trust it, because I’ve seen it time and time again.
I should know and trust it in my own life. We can all look at ourselves and see how we have grown over time. The responsibility is to provide ourselves with the best conditions to make it happen. I have to be honest with what mental states would hold me back, to do all I can to weed and water and nurture. To work hard at it but not expect that I know what the gestation period is for any sort of growth. And especially not to look at a perceived time-line, a clock face that condenses infinity into sections, and think that if growth does not conform to this, it does not exist.
