Welcoming softness

Lessons from a soft spring

Early in the relationship that lasted most of my 20s, my partner and I debated whether I was autumn or spring. He saw me as spring, and I insisted otherwise. I took spring to mean bubbly, joyful, and easy. It didn’t account for the slowness, quiet, and sadness I needed space for. Autumn has always been my favorite season (not least of all because it contains my birthday) because it offers a slowing and grounding that comes as a welcome reprieve. I resisted a characterization that took that away from me. Today, I am here to concede that perhaps he was right all along.

Since I’ve started paying attention to the seasons, I’ve found spring to be my most challenging. I struggle with the gradual emergence from the season of darkness and rest. Winter’s permission towards quiet and grounding begins to fall away. I try to hurdle headlong through the transition into the fullness of summer, only to be whiplashed back into a need for more reprieve. I am uncomfortable in the liminal, gradual, unfolding process of spring. I feel unmoored in its unfurling and grasp for the certainty that comes with the quiet of winter or the fullness of summer.

This past spring, it occurred to me that my challenge with springtime comes from it feeling like too much of me. Since my earliest playground memories, I’ve been characterized as sensitive. It was usually discussed with the tone of a problem to solve. I have also always been highly imaginative, and every archetypal personality test attributes to me a quality of airiness. I spend a lot of energy trying to strengthen and ground myself. I try to push past the softness and into stability. In the springtime, without the anchors that the other seasons offer me, I am confronted with the sense that left to myself, I might float away.

This week, I went with my college best friend to get my color analysis done with a local stylist. I wasn’t sure what I would be, but I had confidently ruled out a few options. In particular, I was confident the pale colors of soft spring weren’t for me. I imagined myself a true spring, bubbling with boldness, or a dark spring like my mom, anchored by earthiness.

Wrong.
In the analysis, the stylist noticed my freckles, my skin’s warmth, and my dark eyes against my otherwise fair features. These pulled me into a spring palette. Ultimately, though, she focused her ultimate assessment on my skin. I have fair, very sensitive skin—another feature of my sensitivity that I have long resisted. She described it as delicate, almost translucent. She even went so far as to use the word frail. But she didn’t offer these words as insults. They weren’t problems in need of a solution. Instead, she focused on them as opportunities to be honest about who I am.

Rather than choosing colors to drown out, draw down, or overpower my features, she focused on supporting them. She compared my features to my mom’s, highlighting a delicacy in me where my mom’s features told a stronger story. She invited me to support that delicacy with gentleness. Her goal was not to make my features different or better, but instead to choose colors that would honor my softness and serenity

I almost cried as she articulated her reflections. What a gift to have my tenderness witness and reflected back as something worthy of elevation and celebration. What a different frame it was to embrace an honesty about these features instead of an attempt to overpower them.

In my own process, I get impatient with the parts that are in process. I find it easier to love the places I am embodying my full strength and capacity. But I have tender, soft parts longing to feel the same fullness of love and acceptance that I give to the parts that make things look easy.

I encountered the Jenny Holzer quote ‘It is in your self-interest to be very tender” years ago at the Tate in London. I was so struck by it that I created this painting, one of my very first watercolors. It is a lesson I have to return to again and again.

When I think about the softness of spring, I realize its beauty lies in its tenderness and delicacy. Its slow unfolding is a sacred liminal space. The soft petals and impossibly small baby birds are miraculous in their delicacy--that they can contain all that aliveness in such a soft state is an inspiration. The little sprout just beginning to unfurl its tree sized potential cannot be rushed. Can I welcome this lingering? Can I offer the same patience, gentleness, and adoration to the tender, delicate, and slow unfurling in my own sensitive being?