Emerging
Transitioning from Winter
If you are a regular or if you have landed on Tarantula: Authors and Art welcome. This year, we hope that our stories as well as the artists that we feature will inspire you to start your own creative journey, and our house team of writers will join you on this ride. This April, our inspiration is Dutch artist Koen de Vries. And today’s reflexion was written by our reader Lidia Oshlyansky, who just might become one of our regular house writers.
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It’s April 5th and it’s snowing. It’s not just snowing, it’s snowing hard and it’s sticking to the ground. It feels like winter will never end although the longer days have given a little hope, the fresh snow seems to have dampened even the spirits of the most ardent supporters of the seasonal changes in Stockholm.
“I can’t take it any longer” has become my refrain. I say it on every call with every colleague based outside Sweden. I take my laptop over to the large window facing out into the woods and fields around my house and point them at the snow.
“Do you see that?!? It’s bloody snowing. It’s April for God’s sake!!!”
They laugh, commiserate, remind me that London and New York weather in early spring is nothing to brag about.
“It’s beautiful though. Especially the sun on the snow right now” says my best friend as I share photos with her on WhatsApp. “It’s like Narnia”
“You don’t have to walk the dog in this shite four times a day” I grump back.
“But look at the light, look at how you can see spring in the trees anyway; that photo you sent, you can see those little fuzzy things that show up on trees in spring.”
She’s right of course. I’ve become a world class grump. I can’t see the beauty emerging and the light playing magically on the snow and the trees budding in defiance of the re-arrived cold. If you look you can see the spring emerging from the sides. It’s a bit sketchy, not yet fully realised, it’s got rough edges and as yet to be fully shaped curves, but it is there.
I find it tough to remember the light of spring and the warmth of summer at the end of the very long Scandinavian winter. I condition myself to ‘survive’ rather than enjoy the winter and so I set myself up to be a grump each spring when it takes too long, in my estimation, for spring to assert itself. A better response would definitely be to be a bit more child-like about it and to see the slowly appearing signs that a new season is approaching. Like looking for shapes in the clouds, if you give yourself time and you look closely you will see that face, that dragon, that bunny - you just need to take the time to look through the not so clearly visible until something reveals itself.
Our April artist, Koen de Vries’ work reminded me that beauty emerges from something sketched out, still somewhat roughly hewn and that makes it all the more beautiful. You can see the shape of it emerge, the cast of the eye, the start of a smile, the glimmer of spring in the late arriving snow.
A few days later, I see the first little purple crocus defying the snow and peeking through, then a few days after that all of them and the snow is gone. Spring bursting through everywhere all at once, shouting “I’m here, winter be gone.”
I think mother nature is trying to tell me “give things time to emerge, give them space to show their potential, their beauty and they will. Their glorious imperfections will be the most beautiful.”
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