Spring Panic

It seems like half the world is stretching out the darkness of winter. Some trees slow to come into leaf. And people. People I care about. Hunkered down in the dark. Withdrawn from the world. And the people who care about them. I have made it through winter without falling into the pit, but I look around and find that too many others have fallen. Depression, anxiety - is it worse this year, or have I been so withdrawn from the world in the past that I failed to notice my fellow sufferers? Not that they really are 'fellow' sufferers, because there is little fellowship in the withdrawal, the shrinking down into the hard core of the black hole. Nor is there fellowship in the desperate flailing of anxiety which threatens to explode and disperse, to the universe, the mind, body and soul.

Is my noticing of so many people's despair and anxiety a sign that my mental health is much improved, so that I'm less absorbed with my own? Or is it a sign that my mental health is on the decline again? All I know, is a sense of panic that I can't save the world, not even my own small part of it. In a quick rough count I thought of fifteen people (that figure has been revised five times since I started writing this, as more faces and reaching hands appear in my mind) who I feel I want to, and should be, supporting at this point of time, as they live with mental illness, physical illness, bereavement. Having gotten to the end of this paragraph, I realise that it sounds like arrogance and a hugely over-inflated sense of self-importance! I don't think that's what it is, it's just that people are what I care about most.

And then there's the other half of this ridiculous world which is bursting with frantic growth. Every morning, walking around our land as I feed the animals, I see new growth. The bamboo grows a couple of centimetres daily. 

There's new blossom on yet another tree,

the grass is thick, fresh-green and absurdly long. The chooks are laying 10 - 12 eggs a day and the beehives are bursting at the seams - so much so that one swarmed, 

so now we have four hives instead of three. 

There are weeds growing strongly in newly prepared gardens, potatoes needing hoeing and hilling up. There are seeds to sow, seedlings to plant, an orchard to scythe before the long grass over whelms the trees.

There is so much to do as nature dances exuberantly.

And inside me, alongside the worry, and the crazy growing season, there is another kind of panic as I realise I am growing old and there are so very many things I want to do before I die. So many things I want to do each day, that the only way to close down the there's-not-enough-time panic is to immerse myself in something, but because there is so much, I can't chose, and illogically immerse myself in a book or a silly computer game because it's all too much.

Would someone please bring on the lazy, hazy beach days of summer and relax my crazy mind?