Welcoming Spring

Everything started waking up in my part of New England a few weeks ago. There is debris from trees’ blossoms on my bike commute every morning and evening, pressed into the asphalt by the several-ton cars as they make their way wherever they are going. One of the things I like the most about being on a bike is how, in the absence of mediation, there is so much opportunity to see things, but not in the frantic way of having to peer over cars from the sidewalk. And the flowers keep making me think of Persephone.

I went to the farmers’ market for the first time since 2025 this weekend and got some ramps and seedlings for planting (including, happily, Thai basil) in the tiny allotment that my landlady added for tenants’ use a few years ago. I packed the seedlings and filled in the gaps with the ramps and an abundance of radishes (with bushy, rough foliage) in my bike’s front basket, and then I used silicone grabbing strips (modl, if you’re curious) to help hold it all down. I put salad greens in my trunk bag purse. The streets are bumpy from the freeze-thaws of coastal winters, but my plants were fine, with only a few clumps of soil lost.

Earlier this spring, for the first time, I did one of those charity bike rides of the sort that happens in New England towns, where we raised money for local and regional organizations in the lead-up to the ride. This was the year that I realized it wasn’t a race and so I signed up for the first time. I got to try out some bike lanes I didn’t know about and go through neighborhoods I haven’t seen before. I knew nobody there, but because everything involved being on a bike and riding at a slow-ish pace, it wasn’t like conversation was mandatory, and I liked it.

I learned that the folding bike where I lock up at work is very recognizable because a few people also commute by bike and park at the same rack. I’m the one with a cat bell, and I fold my commuter bike in half around the rack because the geometry of a folding bike makes it really hard to lock the frame and the wheels at the same time when it’s unfolded.

How I’ve classified my two bikes for the moment is that the folder is for stop-and-go traffic and the busier part of town. It has an internal hub and smaller wheels, which means I can shift into a low gear while stopped at red lights and accelerate much faster. It has dynamo lights, so I don’t need to charge them, and the back dynamo has a brake function. The bike that was my first adult transportation purchase (and first big purchase at all) has become the bike that I ride for longer rides with fewer stoplights or for neighborhood errands because it’s simpler to lock up.

The beauty of spring contrasts a bit with what I’ve been consuming. Madeleine Jubilee Saito’s You Are A Sacred Place: Visual Poems for Living in Climate Crisis contrasts someone lying in bed in a dark place with fire-season motifs and the hope of trees’ roots and branches breathing and the murmuration of birds. My therapist and I decided that I needed to DNF a self-help book on neurodivergent friendship skills even though I tend to finish things I read. I’m reading about New England French Canadian history, watching a lot of comprehensible input to improve my non-academic French, reading Kim Thúy’s Ru in French, and slowly working on a few creative projects. What happened during winter related to Greenland has shifted a lot of my goals, and finding the digitized copies in the Library of Congress of the French-language publication my trisaïeul du surnom contributed to and within which so many of my family members announced special moments of their lives made me reflect a lot on what language loss and persistence mean. One’s relationship to the persistence or loss of French in its many complexities is a defining ancestral baggage feature of being a descendant of the French communities in North America. I’m not very into astrology, but my Jupiter DC line apparently goes right through Montréal, which I didn’t expect, but I guess that may make sense.

The tone of grief in Saito’s You Are A Sacred Place brought to mind a lot of my emotions that started around 2022 or 2023. We are very interconnected with the world. In the myths, nymphs are marrying humans, and they are producing human children. The symmetry of the forests burning and human social relationships burning and everything all going up in smoke at the same time is powerful, and the emotion that I cannot name but feel powerfully is connected to the images in the book of roots and branches and the memory of the choking smoke that descended on New England a few years ago.

One of the things that resonated with me when I restarted bike commuting and reading essays about doing it better is how being outside of the cage-like construction of a car removes that artificial separation between a person and the rest of the planet, where the shield-like construction creates blind spots that are a danger to those outside of the vehicle even as they protect the vehicle’s inhabitant. Sometimes I wonder as I’m running errands and living my life whether people in a car are blocked from seeing the canopies of flowers looming over the streets or the calm coolness of light rain on a hot day or the electric feeling of the air on frigid winter days. The visible, sensational feedback of the road’s texture. Unlike walking, I’m not carrying the weight of my possessions. The bike is. So it feels like motion, and it has a dynamic freedom to it. You can feel the transitions between the Kronian winter to the Zeusian spring to Ares’ blistering summer and then to the fecundity of Aphrodite in her autumnal celebration because the small shifts in weather and light matter a lot.

I threw a lot of myself into The Soul’s Inner Statues, and I realized while talking to my therapist recently that it was a depleting event because I was pouring out every last bit of intellectual vitality and power I had into trying to do something good and useful and uplifting despite how muddy my life was. It was like birthing a lotus. Ordinarily, with a thing like that, the depletion would have turned into a slow filling of my inner aquifer again, only life got complicated really quickly, and things kept happening. It’s maybe half-full now that I’m not trying to push through anymore. It’s a lot like how natural disasters were once uncommon and are now relentless, and we have to find moments of life and joy in the interludes between when terrible things happen.

People on bike commuting forums, and also on the multimodal Reddit forum dedicated to venting about car dependency (r/fuckcars), call people driving cars cagers. It’s a frustrated term that has a lot to do with the aftermath of the poor multimodal planning that we are all suffering through, some countries’ refusal to consider the safety of people outside of a vehicle in safety standards, and how much space is surrendered in cities to the money black hole of street parking that could be used for homes and businesses that could produce real tax revenue and balance city budgets instead. Caged is how I felt back when I was more online than I am now, though, especially with undiagnosed autism when things kept going wrong because people were reading into things I said and I was trying to figure out what on Earth was going on so much of the time, which led to a lot of stuff that I’m working on with a professional. (It is definitely a caged feeling to always be dreading that interpersonal interactions that seem to be going OK are not and that you won’t know until something catches fire.) And I would say that Influencers are caged in digital boxes, with a similar impact on the online ecosystem that car dependency has in the analog one (and a major part of working through my online polytheism resentment is actually working through my anger at how the Influencer economy has emboldened spiritual predation). Why not develop a home practice and commit to presence instead? Academics are caged by publish-or-perish, which forces people to put out content even about things that don’t merit discussion or which should be one long paper instead of five short ones … and to not report on negative results or false hopes because the metrics don’t reward those. Some cages are important, like the ones lowered into water so people can view sharks and other dangerous ocean animals up close. Cages are a tool, and very overused, and probably not the thing we should be jumping to >90% of the time we need to go somewhere or interact with someone, especially since they insulate perpetrators from the consequences of their actions, just as people in cars are insulated from consequences when they hit a pedestrian or cyclist, or insulated from feeling the rain on their skin, or the raw and unfiltered consequences of climate change when the air fills with burning smoke from the grandmotherly forests burning. (As the world warms, does Ares’ summer consume more and more of the calendar?)

Ultimately, though, I’m happy for spring. Voici le mai, le joli mois de mai, as the Corvus Corax song goes. The more seasons I see unfiltered on the bike, and the more I fall into noticing, the happier I am, and the more gets directed into the groundwater that feeds me, and the more I can throw energy into routines that act as a positive feedback loop, such as getting back into a more nourishing and mentally present rhythm at shrine.

Have a wonderful spring.