Happy spring!
Despite the complaints on Twitter, there’s nothing wrong, in my opinion, in talking about the March holidays, just like we talk about the December holidays. Many cultures hold celebrations around the equinoxes, just like they do around the solstices. We just had Purim, Easter, Nowruz and Holi, and Ramadan is still ongoing for another week. Plenty of March holiness to celebrate. Not to mention Passover, in the third week of April this year, and Orthodox Easter, which is in the first week of May this year.
Quite a few of these holidays involve eggs, flowers and other signs of spring – after all, all of the religions referenced above originated in the Northern Hemisphere. It makes for interesting situations when they are transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere, but that is a whole other conversation. I apologise – but this musing is about spring. If it is currently autumn for you, feel free to tuck this piece away and read it in six months.
Another celebration held this week, to the annoyance of some people as it happened to coincide with Easter on March 31st, is International Trans Day of Visibility. It was a day to celebrate the trans people in our midst – they have always been here, and they always will be, no matter how hard some institutions try to enforce a rigid gender binary, for their own purposes.
Being trans or gender-fluid is inherently subversive – after all, if people are allowed to follow their own still small voice in this matter, who knows what else they might decide not to accept anymore? The Talmud, not known for its liberal views on the patriarchy, does accept that people are the best (and in some circumstances, only) judges of their own needs – a concept that is encapsulated in a quote from Proverbs 14:10: “The heart knows its own bitterness”.
Celebrating and supporting people who are true to themselves is a wonderful thing to do – just as wonderful as celebrating the awakening of the Earth after its winter sleep, in all the different guises that manifold human traditions have created. As the days get longer and warmer, many of us shake off the dust and sleepiness of winter, ready to get moving with new projects and new ideas.
How do you celebrate spring? I’d love to know!