“The Great Unclenching”
Hello, Friends, and welcome to this inaugural blog post. Thank you for visiting my website and for being curious about my blog.
I am curious about it too! Blogging is new to me, so, like a lump of clay yet to be sculpted, or, more aptly, a blank page, I’m not sure what the blog will decide to be. I suspect there will be musings about birds, dogs, flowers, forests, good times, bleak times, and being human.
I promise that my posts will be brief! Indeed, we all have so much to read and so little time. Perhaps this blog will offer you an occasional nugget worth turning over for a minute or two. Or maybe even something to hold onto.
One image I held onto recently was from New York Times writer Melissa Kirsch’s column in the paper’s “The Morning” newsletter The Morning: Lightening up. Writing on the eve of Daylight-Saving Time, Melissa describes her craving for light and longer days, calling the emergence of spring “The Great Unclenching.”
Reading her words, I loosened my jaw a bit and let my shoulders fall. In winter, we tighten against the cold, “zip ourselves up into ourselves,” and “default to indoors.” But spring offers us a chance to loosen up and become expansive. Melissa compares our winter and spring postures this way: “Keeping ourselves small and contained vs. letting loose our full splendor.”
“The season of scarcity is coming to a close,” she writes, “and now we will spend ourselves with abandon.”
Spend ourselves with abandon? Wheeeeee! I was good at that once upon a time. I was a little girl who ran through the woods, rolled down grassy hills, and jumped ocean waves. As a teen, I waterskied on just one ski, gleefully tugging the tow rope to cross the boat’s curling wake.
But what now? What can it mean, so many years later, to “let loose our full splendor”?
Perhaps it can be anything whereby we lose ourselves—even for a moment—to become completely present to something that captures us. In our attentiveness and appreciation, we become ourselves more fully in the world.
I know I will not be rolling down any grassy hills, at least not on purpose. But I just might pull on my hiking boots and go to the forest in search of the season’s first eye-popping, creamy-white bloodroot blossom, and be among the first to hear the call of the yellow warbler, newly returned from neo-tropical climes. The thought of this makes my heart sing!
In the longer, warmer days ahead, how will you “spend yourself with abandon” and “let loose your full splendor”? I would love to know. Perhaps we will inspire each other to step out and rediscover the meaningfulness of play.
Photo: Bloodroot is an early-spring bloomer in Kanawha State Forest. I took this photo on April 9, 2023.
Sheila McEntee 
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