The space between the unpredictable phases of late winter sometimes allows me a certain disconnection, a feeling similar to what I experience when I am completely free of obligations, or when everything is suddenly beyond my control.
The fact that the advance of external spring is outside of my power gives me an excuse to imagine that I do not have influence in matters of internal spring. Allowing myself to be caught at the crossroads of interseasonal ambivalence, I willingly give up my autonomy for a neutral sanctuary.
My anticipation about the approach of equinox and regret at the end of my winter hibernation clash like the frontal dichotomies of late winter weather, and a resultant stalemate spins me into a temporal and spatial slough, an eye of the storm.
Or it is as if the end of the road were still a ways off, as though I were safely between home and my destination, as though there were still plenty of time, as though the moment of truth had been delayed indefinitely.
My clear January orientation has been shunted away by the split personality of the current landscape, its signals and signs mixed, pointing one way and then another. Caught between the first warm snowdrops and the daffodil snows, I lose control over which way I am going, and I take on the ambivalence of nature, pretending to imitate it, riding that excuse at this peak of freedom in which the past hides and the future is unimagined, in which I, for a moment, live suspended above concern and judgment.