SPRINGTIDE: THE GARDEN

It feels like we’ve been waiting for it for too long. Winter doesn’t want to be thought of as cold and endless, it just is. In the way Monday didn’t ask to be … well, Mondays. Here comes the tide of green, the earth splits open, and from the soil life erupts.

We have stepped through the threshold into warm air, into the scent of living things pushing upward through the frozen earth some of it still laden with winter’s weight, some of it parched and struggling. When we look back we can see behind us, the cave where we took shelter and sat with ourselves over the long nights. It has a different silence now however. A silence we know, flickering shadows of the fire reflect on the walls that we actively painted.

I think I’ve said this before but, I love the in between places. Twilight. Fall and spring. The moments before, as well as after, a rain. Anticipation on both sides of the dominate. Springtide is one step through the doorway between knowing and acting, that liminal place where we bring our pieces together to try to make a better whole. So we must nurture what we have planted, care for it, for here... here is emergence.

The garden we grow in is wild, despite our desires. We are Green Man’s domain, where with the knowledge of what we want to grow into reaches toward the sun without apology. We’ve done the work and now we want to plant ourselves here. Feet in fertile soil.

Remember that in the garden also grows weeds.

In Springtide we are at the third station of the wheel. First we descended into shadow. Then we stood at the threshold and brought what we acknowledged home again and into ourselves. Now comes the question that matters most, the one that gives all that inner work its purpose:

How do we grow?

This work has a shape. Our ancestors knew it. They carved it in standing stones, painted it on cave walls, built it into their calendars with stone and spoke, and adorned their bodies with ink reminders.

A wheel. Six stations marking the sun’s journey. One complete turn through the seasons, through the work, through the transformation the alchemists called the Great Opus. We follow in footsteps of countless souls on the same journey.

Two stations behind us now our feet again in the third.

The cave where we met our shadows in winter’s longest dark. Nigredo. The blackening. The necessary dissolution where everything we thought we were came apart so something truer could percipitate. We began with the thought that we were solid, black ink on white paper, our story written and complete. What we found instead was that our ink is just a drop diluted in water. There is so much more to us than the story we’d been telling.

The threshold where we stood as ice broke and light returned. Albedo. The whitening. The purification that comes from bringing home what we’d exiled rather than casting it out. With that dilution of our pure concept of self, we internalize other aspects, other possibilities for what our story can become.

The alchemists mapped this geography in the steps we are following in these articles. Jung walked it in his works, particularly the Red Book, which he patterned after the Taoists who wrote The Secret of the Golden Flower. The practice they described was the backward-flowing movement, the turning inward that must happen before energy can flow outward with authenticity. An investment in self.

“As within, so without.”
~The Kybalion

The law of correspondence. Our inner work can never be separated from the outer life. We descended so we could stand here, in the garden, in the world, in our lives, as integrated beings. The work must continue.

Spring arrives whether we are ready or not. The winter’s work prepared us to meet it whole.

Springtide to the alchemists is rubedo. The reddening and the sacred marriage.

Now, right now, is when we integrate into our lives what we identified in the dark. We learned things about ourselves, uncomfortable things, wonderous things, joy as well as disgust. In Springtide the knowledge has the opportunity to become active and alive in the world. The shadow we recognized is brought into consciousness. You realize these aspects were never separate from you, just the drum beat to your harmony. Different instruments playing in the same symphony.

If we want the whole self, the wild self, to bloom we must plant with intentionality. There is danger here. Hunger, hubris, I know what I need. The self knows hunger and will feed it. So each seed we plant must be done with the forethought of what it will grow.

Jung called this the birth of the “Self” in his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower. Not the ego’s small self, but the capital-S Self. You’ve heard the expression we reap what we sow. We want to be the golden flower blooming at the center where opposites meet. The divine child born from the marriage of darkness and light, human and animal.

Luckily for us, we are not the first people to have had this moment on the wheel, nor is this the first turn for any of us. Spring mythology runs incredibly deep. Persephone returning from the underworld with death’s knowledge. Dionysus reborn, both civilized and wild. The Horned God emerging to dance with the Maiden in Beltane’s fires. Ancient knowledge we feel in our bones that renewal comes from carrying our experience onward. Being transformed, there is nothing so liberating, for the soul as to feel itself grow.

The Beltane fires blaze between two trees. Seeds go into earth when soil warms enough to receive them. We walk the forest edges hunting morels. Nourishment that only fruits where things have burned, where death has fed the soil.

We stand at this station with everything we’ve gathered in the long night. We shouldn’t ask the question “Am I healed?” We have to be more practical and ask:

What will I grow?

This is where intentionality comes in.

If dreams are the unconscious speaking to consciousness, then ritual is how the conscious self speaks back to the unconscious. Ritual in our daily lives comes down to relationships, how we approach our spouses, our work, our children. We either nourish a true relationship, the kind where you risk being seen as all of what you are, or we don’t. What we do, what we ritualize is what we teach ourselves.

In our hearts the pack animal still prowls. We group with the familiar. Circle around the fire with our people. Ten thousand generations of our lineage survived because they knew how to be with each other as whole beings. They gathered with the full truth of what they were and still chose each other. Still chose the work. Still chose to tend the fire and tell the stories and pass the knowledge forward.

Spring is the season of connection. Romantic connection, yes. Beltane celebrates the sacred sexuality, the fertility rites, the acknowledgment that our bodies are expressions of the divine. But also communal connection. Ecological connection. The web of relationship that sustains life.

This is when we emerge from our winter work and ask: Who are my people? What do I have to offer them? What work in the world calls to this integrated self I’ve identified?

The Kybalion teaches that rhythm governs everything, the pendulum swing from inward to outward, from descent to ascent, from winter’s cave to spring’s garden. We cannot stay in the dark forever. The work isn’t complete until it moves.

In other traditions this is a season of foraging. We walk out into the forest edges with open hands. To bring something back to the fire. We use what we have learned and bring it back to share with everyone. Not everyone is going to like what we have to offer, but it’s a legitimate offering from the self.

The same attention serves in the city, at work, in the spaces where we spend most of our time. Learning who nourishes, what drains, where our energy actually feeds something living. Here we are a participant, not a consumer. The community feeds us because we’ve enriched the soil, moved through it as collaborator rather than competitor.

This is expression. Authentic participation in the living world.

What changes when you show up in your relationships as whole? When the shadow you’ve integrated can be brought to the work without running you? In your partnerships? In your community? In the way you move through the world?

What becomes possible when you plant intentionally? When you tend what matters and let the weeds teach you discernment?

The Green Man knows. The wild god who is half-human, half-forest, who breathes leaves and bleeds sap. He embodies his nature fully, and in that embodiment, in that complete acceptance of what he is, he becomes sacred. The wildness itself is the holiness.

The planting is not the end. The wheel keeps turning.

Three more stations wait as the year spirals on. Summer’s peak when what we’ve planted flowers. Autumn’s harvest when we gather what’s grown and choose what to keep. Winter’s return when we stand at the doorway again, honoring what has passed, preparing for the next descent.

Multiplication. Projection. Fermentation. The alchemical work deepening.

We’ll stand in the cave again when winter comes. We’ll sit by the fire on the longest night. But we won’t be the same people who first entered that darkness. Each turn reveals something we couldn’t see before because we weren’t whole enough to hold it. The spiral continues, opening petals we didn’t know existed.

For now, we are here. Third station. In the garden. In spring’s wild emergence.

The earth split open. Green erupting. Our hands in the soil.

The seeds we plant are choices. Commitments. What we will tend as the wheel turns toward summer and harvest.

You know what the shadows hold now. You’ve sat with them. You’ve stood at the threshold and brought the pieces together. You’ve stepped into the garden as a whole being.

So plant.

Plant what your integrated self hungers for. What the beast and the human agree needs tending. What the shadow says is true.

Plant the relationships that feed you. The work that uses your whole self. The practices that keep you rooted in the physical world we exist in. The connections to land, to community, to the spiritual world.

The cave waits for winter’s return. The threshold will stand again. The wheel brings us back to every station, again and again, spiraling deeper into ourselves so that when we return to the flow we can wonder at just how much further we have to go.

But first, Springtide. First, our garden. Now, the sacred marriage made flesh in seed and soil.

The wheel keeps turning. We turn with it.

Keep going.

J.G. ∴ Hermes Thane

https://x.com/HermesThane
https://substack.com/@hermesthane