This year the arrival of spring caught me in England. It’s been many years since I experienced the spring equinox in the country of my birth and I enjoyed that shove into the cold stimulating air with undeniable masoquism.

Early spring is stark in the UK. There are plenty of daffodils, the last snowdrops, a few burgeoning primroses and a faint green hue on some trees. The sharp air awakens you with an icy slap when you venture outdoors. Winter is just one step back. It’s nothing like the warm spring of Mallorca and southern Spain where even in March the fields are covered in yellow vinagrilla and the fragrance of orange blossom is already relaxing your senses with a foretaste of summer. Spring is easy here, but instead of drifting along in the soft Mediterranean climate, sometimes the whip of a northern climate is something to be grateful for.

There is nothing sensuous about early spring in England. It hurts, like putting numbed fingers into a bowl of warm water. It’s a time for painful growth, for pushing tender shoots through rock hard earth under the cruel stimulants of sun and rain. Is there no beauty without suffering?

It’s also a wake up call to face what bothers or worries us, to what we have hidden under our warm winter blankets. The unsolved problem, the irksome relationship, the unfinished project, the unfulfilled dream suddenly sit up and stare you impudently in the face, showing you all their and your cracks and flaws in the spring light. Blood begins to flow more quickly, opening the way through lethargic veins like the sap rising through new leaves.

The English spring in its cold indifferent beauty reminds me of how we should stir up our lives, speak our truth, renew, let go of the past because we, too, are only here in passing and, how many springs have we left?

No one wrote more truthfully about spring than T. S Eliot in The Waste Land:

April is the cruelest month breeding,

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Now that I am back in the warm blossoming south, I intend to spend more early springs in England. I have realised how much I need that mighty push out of my comfort zone on this beautiful but sleepy island.