A Fine Spring Day

Spring has returned.  The Earth is like a child that knows poems.  ~Rainer Maria Rilke

Sunlight in spring is the most natural medicine. It warms our skin and our soul, stimulates hormones and nourishes the mind, it connects us vitally to our senses and each of those senses to each other. We arrive blinking into the light: “Every spring is the only spring - a perpetual astonishment.” Memories seemingly buried for months emerge into our consciousness; we keenly feel our pulses beating in time with the wakening world.

We rarely feel more physically alive and connected to other people, even strangers, than in Spring. We smile and laugh spontaneously, remove layers of clothing and dress more showily and sensually, in brief we divest ourselves of normal inhibitions. This release is part of the Dionysian impulse to slough off our shackled (winter) personae and dissolve into the moment. Joseph Addison wrote more prosaically: “What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.” Spring is not just a time of year; it is a state of mind… Like heliotropes we turn our faces to the light.

As Oscar Wilde memorably observed: Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.” Spring is effortlessly brilliant, it is the time of year that encourages birth – and regeneration - and when beauty flourishes and when ideas and emotions flow. Spring is the genius of beauty.

Let us savour these wonderful sappy days and make the most of them. We’ve suffered from a scourge of bad news over the last few months; it freezes resolve and makes us retreat into our shells. It is easy to pour a glass of wine and speculate why it is half empty, let’s celebrate what we have, appreciate things more intensely, become aethestically more responsive.

Which leads me to my final thought in this digression. This year I just want to drink good wine (or be more discriminating), for good wine brings pleasure, and pleasure yields generous thoughts. I would appeal to those to whom we sell wine to allow some sunny idealism to permeate the not-so-pure commercial imperative.

There is a simple, sentimental Irish blessing that captures the spirit of generosity, “May flowers always line your path and sunshine light your day. May songbirds serenade you every step along the way. May a rainbow run beside you in a sky that’s always blue. And may happiness fill your heart each day your whole life through.”