Dirt AND Whimsy: Ideas for a Non-Aesthetic-Driven Spring
Journal prompts, activity ideas, and longer resources for having a spring of being wild.
After writing about surviving winter for the past 5 months, it seems natural to have a dedicated newsletter here on emerging from winter for the spring equinox, which happened yesterday. Even if it is still cold out where you’re reading this from (as Boston is today), there are still spots of spring beginning to emerge and I’ll be damned if I don’t try to notice them.
When I started the draft for this newsletter, I found my excitement to write it drain as soon as the blinking cursor appeared. This was not the usual form of writer’s block that comes up whenever you are first starting a piece. The idea of writing this article had been funky and interesting but when I went to create it for Substack a script emerged about how to write popularly about spring for The Internet.
It needed to be calm. It needed to be about a reset (despite my open loathing for the concept of the self that requires constant attempts at improvement). It needed to be some sort of performance of a floating, ethereal, unflappable, almost unfeeling woman. A Pinterest board of green and white and beige seemed to threaten from the background. When I met the page, this story of how we celebrate spring, especially as women performing online, came to mind.
Social media forms us as much as any physical world experience or community does. I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with finding the inner-voyeur/inner-critic metabolized and living in my own mind. Even the recent trend of performing whimsy (which I, as a creator, am at times a part of) felt unalive.
The trend of whimsy online is still a performance, and what was once a wide-open word now looks a very certain way—small red glasses, thin women (often white), pops of design in the dressing and in the background, living in NYC or somewhere in California with an expensive apartment, with a listicle on being more whimsical with activities to do. In and of itself, this is not bad, and is actually a good thing compared to the constriction and pure performance of discipline that the “clean girl” aesthetic espoused.
As the trend has continued, I’ve found myself more ill at ease. Maybe it is because to me, whimsy has always been tied to presence and play. Whimsy was free, intrinsically, from self-consciousness. As with all internet aesthetics, it now is taught online to primarily women not as something that emerges joyfully from within but that is pressured down onto our life experience.
Do I think paper chains, colorful clothes, and crafts are a bad thing? Obviously not—I myself wrote about them at Christmastime. I think if the trend or ideas are taken up just as that and encourage people to live in a more playful way, it’s lovely. But as it continues to get likes, shares, and thus brand deals online, like trends before it, it becomes hollowed out. It is something you show instead of are.
I say all of this for a reason: This is not what I want to offer you for spring. I want to offer here places from which to jump off from, and maybe that’s what all the #whimsymaxxing girls want to do, too. I want to offer that continual image of Mary Oliver—which is to live from a sense of finding our “place in the family of things.” As I wrote about last year for Mary Oliver May, presence and being a creature can offer us a way of understanding ourselves as part of the beauty and awe that Nature evokes.
To be wild is the opposite of performance and an escape from self-objectification. You can put sprinkles in your coffee, and then show the dishes in the sink, the ugly lighting in your apartment that may be priced soon out of your price range. You can wear linen and have picnics and still be angry with bitten-down nails. You can find out what you like, what you don’t like, and stop looking at others. This is the wisdom of a creature.
The bud emerges from inside the bark. The caterpillar molts and emerges by cracking through the chrysalis. The sprout emerges from dirt. This spring, I want to emerge from within.
