The renewal of spring is everywhere, visable change almost hour by hour

Spring is another country. So different are these bright days from the dark days of a month ago that one might think one has moved to another land.

The blind 19th century poet Anthony Raftery (Raifteirí, an file) at the start of his paean to Spring, Anois teacht an Earraigh, arises, as if from a winter spent in the chimney corner, to set off travelling.

After St Bridget’s day, the light would be strengthening; he’d head down to Mayo, there to play his fiddle and find his youth restored.

The restorative joys of spring would put a spring in the step of anybody who walks out on these sun-bright days.

The mornings last week were flooded with light, and the evening almost mellow, so warm and golden was the sun.

Outdoors, all nature is budding and blooming, and bursting forth in song. Recently, a reader emailed me, asking me to direct him to some paragraph I’d written years ago about the joys of keeping one’s eyes open to nature.

I eventually found the paragraph; it was commenting on the singular beauty of every county in this land of ours. What I said still holds true.

One day last week, a friend of ours voiced her belief in the efficacy of the therapy called Mindfulness. Having witnessed the holy-joe antics of devotees of the 1960s Maharishi, Bhagwan Rajneesh, etcetera, fads, I tend to be sceptical about paths to enlightenment.

But from what she told us, it seemed that ‘mindfulness’ was a method by which those who practice it seek to transcend the busy mind to reach awareness of the moment, and of nature, and of all that is happening around them. I would applaud that.

It seems clear that in the pressures of today’s world, many of our fellow men and women seem imprisoned in their concerns, cut off, victims of loneliness. This is a cruel state.

If Mindfulness is indeed a discipline which can be learned — a method, which, like meditation, can release the victim from the imprisoning mind — then it is, surely, a good thing.

READ MORE: Why mindfulness should be front and centre as a national health consideration

Meanwhile, here in Ireland, the sights and sounds of the natural world on our doorsteps continue, as always, to offer panaceas to worldly cares.

While poetry and literature, music and art sometimes portray the turbulence of nature, more often they present a universe which is calm rather than frenetic, full of light rather than darkness, a healing place.

Never is this truer than now, in spring. Renewal is everywhere evident in hedges and ditches, fields and woods. The locked-down sameness of winter, when the earth, if not the sea and sky, lies dormant, is over.

There is visible change, almost by the hour.

Chicks hatch in the raven’s nest; one can see, through binoculars, pink, naked heads hardly bigger than grapes, poke above the nest edge. Nearby, gorse blooms like a flamboyant scarf of gold edging the cliffs over the sea.

The first flush of primroses (‘prima rosa’, first rose; thus, came its name) edges the path. Birds sing and show themselves, marking territory, attracting mates.

Buds on branches burst into the first tender leaves, wood anemones open on the forest floor amongst the shoots of bluebells and ramsons, fields are sprinkled with white daisies or are ploughed, revealing, dark, fresh soil.

Wood violets glow darkly in the hedges. Lords and Ladies (Arum lilies) are in robust leaf, the yellow flower-spike not yet pushing upright through the vulva-shaped centre that gives them their popular name.

Wispy drifts of small purple flowers, fumitory, hug the ground; almost blue in sunlight, they resemble smoke, hence the derivation.

Dandelions, (lion’s teeth, ‘dent-de-lion’), bloom full blast on the ditches, and wall pennywort, also called navelwort, a much-overlooked coloniser of old stone walls, shows its leaves of a thousand colours, pastel lemon, through green to pink, to darkest red.

Named for its penny-shaped, fat, cushiony leaves, or for the navel-like depression at the centre, it will, later, put up tall spikes of small, green-white, bell-like flowers.

Presently, it is spectacular, a sight not to be missed in the sunlight, often with grey lichens in sharp contrast on the stones around.

Insects are a-stir. A ladybird basks in the sun on a mossy bed in a crevice amongst the same sun-warmed stones. A early-woken bumblebee buzzes sleepily past.

At night, this week of the Spring equinox, a horned quarter-moon hangs silvery in the deep, clear sky. Day and night, the world outdoors will surely distract the uneasy of minds from life’s vicissitudes.

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