Currently — March 22nd, 2023

March 21, 2023

What you need to know, currently.

After reading the IPCC report yesterday, I wanted to shake the immense climate anxiety I felt and welcome Astronomical Spring—and its promises of renewal, hope, growth, and sunshine—properly.

So, I mustered up the energy to carve out a couple of new Spring rituals: I went on a hour-long walk without my phone, cleaned my house, and picked the daisy weeds from my front lawn to dry and preserve. I also read a few poems that reminded me of the joyful, courageous resilience that Spring embodies—an attribute I hope to carry with me, particularly amid bouts of climate worry and anxiety.

Here’s one of my favorites:

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out

of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s

almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving

their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate

sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees

that really gets to me. When all the shock of white

and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave

the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,

the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin

growing over whatever winter did to us, a return

to the strange idea of continuous living despite

the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,

I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf

unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

🌱 Wishing everyone a bright and happy Spring season! 🌸

—Aarohi Sheth

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