April is the cruelest month. Eliot wasn’t being dramatic — he was describing what happens when the soil thaws and everything you buried in winter starts pushing back up. Spring doesn’t hand you peace. It hands you mixing: memory and desire, grief and green shoots, the things you’d rather not look at surfacing alongside the ones you were waiting for.
Melissa Kirsch wrote about this in the Times this week, quoting David Ferry’s translation of Horace: “It’s true that Jupiter brings on the hard winters; / It’s also true that Jupiter takes them away.” The same god. The same life. You don’t get one without the other. Samskaras are just the winters you’ve already lived through, pressed into patterns you now carry.
Ashtanga has a word for the practice of holding both: this too. Tara Brach teaches it as a meditation. You greet whatever shows up — the restless knee, the ugly thought, the unexpected grief — with two words. Not resistance. Not fix-it. Just this too. Ishvara pranidhana. Surrender as acknowledgment, not defeat.
The internal work is the same as the external one. Sit quietly. Pay close attention to the weather inside. Svadhyaya is just this: noticing what’s actually there instead of what you wish were there. The hope blowing in with the fear. The lightness and heaviness competing for air. Both are real. Both belong.
So what do you do with all that noticing? You make something. Turn the internal weather into form — a poem, a practice, a conversation, a breath. That’s what art always was. That’s what a posture is too. The season gives you the material; you give it shape. Eliot wrote The Waste Land after his own unbearable winter. Relish seasonal change for its inspirational value.