A Muse for April.

So now it’s April. April has usually been a good month for me.

It was when I first moved to the countryside that I began to feel that there was something in the air in April. It was a subtle, beguiling sort of feeling that I could never describe and still can’t. I assumed then, and still assume, that it had something to do with the energies of nature growing so strongly that they became palpable. I feel them falling dormant again in September.

Some years later I was doing a college course during a period of unemployment, and remember how I used to like walking through the city’s main cemetery on my way home during April. The mild, damp air and the fresh lightness of the greening trees evoked a similar feeling.

When I was working as a landscape photographer I nearly always began my summer season’s commissioned work in April because April usually provided the earliest opportunities to find the right combination of light quality and colour.

And the end of the month brings us to Beltane Eve, and how can I forget the sight of burgeoning growth illuminated by firelight, or the strange lights and flickerings that I reported here one year? In summation, April can be occasionally harsh, but usually it’s a time when we can truly believe that spring is definitely springing.

This April is going to be a strange one. It remains to be seen whether the subtle energies of nature’s resurgence will be masked by the oppressive sense engendered by lockdown. Movement is restricted, contact is restricted, busy thoroughfares are eerily quiet, and even the grocery shopping is a lottery because so many shelves are empty of important items. The magnolia bush in next door’s garden and the cherry trees lining the bottom of the school playing field are all clothed in white blossom as usual, but the view in that direction is missing the children who normally grace it.

This April will have the feel of a dream about it, and not a wholly comfortable dream. The restrictions, the shortages, and the ever present sense of anxiety will suffuse it all. It will be the sort you want to wake from, and who knows how the world might have changed when it’s all over. Some hope that the world will change for the better, while others fear the uncertainty. For my part, the end of the pandemic – if and when it comes – will bring the re-surfacing of other personal issues to feel anxious about.

And time, life’s most powerful tyrant, will tell. If we survive the crisis, something else will kill us sooner or later. And still I wonder whether any of it matters in the end. Meanwhile, maybe we should be grateful that we still have the fleeting gifts of April to distract us.