Spring Is Not a Soft Thing

Happy Spring Equinox! 🌿🔥

I’m writing from my window on this first day of spring, and it’s grey and wet and half cold. Winter is not giving up the ghost without a fight.

But spring is not the soft thing we make it out to be, all buds and birdsong. In the Vajrayana tradition, it’s associated with fire. The fire that reenters the world and lights everything up from inside. The fire that pulls us from our hermetic solitude into life, whether we’re ready or not.

This is spring’s dare: If you want to come alive, you have to be willing to burn.
A few years ago, a wildfire showed me what that actually means.

I was on a mid-winter retreat in the Catskills, a tiny gathering of yogis scattered across the vast property at Menla. I was staying in the house where the Dalai Lama stays when he visits.

The last time he was there, he said the area was inhabited by powerful nagas — serpentine land spirits that could be appeased with gifts of milk left out at night. The city girl in me filed that under “old world cosmology” and tried to put it from my mind.

But every night, I was restless. Dreams full of ominous beings and cryptic transmissions. I’d double check the locks and lie awake listening for movement in the loose leaves outside my window. The wildness of the place felt huge and too close.

At night, I was facing something my daytime practice wasn’t touching: The primal impulse to keep myself separate, held at a distance from the living world.

After a week, I’d had enough of trying to manage my fear. I sat in my room one night and offered myself up to whatever was out there.

“Ok,” I said out loud. “I’m open. Gimme whatchu got.”

Soon after, while reading in bed, I caught the faint smell of smoke. Incense, I thought, or a smoldering cable. But I checked the room and found nothing, so I turned off my reading light.

And my room lit up with an orange glow from outside. I parted the blinds with pounding heart… The mountain was on fire.

Glowing and alive, a wildfire was creeping down the slope toward the house, licking up between old snow and piles of leaves. Awe and terror flared in me as one thing.

I ran down the hall to the Dalai Lama’s bedroom for a better look out the window. There was fire coming down the mountain at the side of the house too. My eyes darted around the room — at the collection of sacred things and ordinary things — and back out at the fire. It did not care whose bedroom this was, whose things.

In Vajrayana, fire is the quality of awareness that knows the phenomenal world by consummating with it: the knower, inseparable from the known, through the burning act of knowing. This wildfire was the direct pointing out of that. Blazing through the boundary I’d spent more than a week defending.

The nearest fire brigade was almost an hour away. A volunteer father and son sped over from a few towns away with a small water truck. The man plugged in the hose and handed it to me gruffly. “Keep it wet,” he said, and ran off to dig a trench while I hosed down a mountainside in my pyjamas.

Eventually, the bigger trucks arrived and relieved me, and just before dawn I crawled into one of the yoga shalas and threw down a mat, exhausted. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had invited this. That I had communicated a readiness for the unknown, and the unknown had entered, blazing, in response.

I kept replaying a moment — and I replay it still — before I called 911. When I was standing at the window in the Dalai Lama’s bedroom, watching impossibly alive fingers of flame wrap themselves around the house. There were no thoughts of inside or outside. No plans, no impulse to move. There was just an aching aliveness that belonged to no one. The mountain and me, fused and on fire.

This is spring. The hot, messy, consummating breath that obliterates our neat winter boundaries and blazes with life.

Join me for the April Moonlit Sit, where we’ll practice sitting in the aliveness of fire, in real time. Deets below.

🔥 Lama Tasha

April Moonlit Sit

DATE: April 1, 2026
TIME: 8-9pm EST
LOCATION: Online (Zoom link emailed on registration)

TOPIC: The Fire of Aliveness
Everything in the body is already burning: sensation, thoughts, the whole flickering constellation of being. This month we practice sitting in that fire, as that fire, with great big hearts like cauldrons, glowing on the hearth.

DANA: This session is open to all on a PWYC basis. If you’d like to support this work, you can donate during registration or become a paid subscriber on Substack.

Register ✨