The Earth Remembers First: What Spring Has Always Known

It happens before I’m ready for it.

Every year, I’m still somewhere inside the long exhale of winter — still wrapped in wool mittens and the particular stillness of a Minnesota February — when I step outside one morning and the ground smells different. It’s a subtle thing, almost below language. Something dark and alive and deeply familiar. The earth is thawing. And before my mind catches up, my whole body already knows: we are turning again.

I first really learned to read that turning in college. My now-husband and I would spend long weekends at a friend’s family sugar shack in the Minnesota woods — the kind of weekends that only make sense in the narrow window between frozen and thawed, when the nights still drop below freezing but the days begin to soften. That’s the secret timing of maple sap: it runs when the temperature swings, when the tree is caught between two worlds. Too warm for long and the season is over. You have to pay attention.

We would trudge through the woods collecting sap, and on the surface, everything still looked dead. Bare branches. Gray sky. The dull silence of a landscape that hasn’t quite woken up yet. But if you slowed down and really looked, you could see it: tiny buds just beginning to swell on the tips of branches, sedge grass greening up where the snowmelt had pulled back, and underneath everything, that smell — mud and earth and something ancient stirring. The best reward after a cold morning of collecting was a mug of hot cocoa made with the sap water itself, before it had been boiled down. It was barely sweet, almost imperceptible — just the faintest whisper of what it would become. We’d sit around late into the night, music playing, talking about everything and nothing, while the sap boiled down in the background.

That image has stayed with me for decades: a forest that looks dead but is secretly, invisibly, moving. Sweetness traveling upward through bare wood. You have to know how to look — and how to taste — to find it.

Across thousands of years and hundreds of cultures, spring has been greeted not as a shift on the calendar, but as exactly that — a sacred return. A resurrection. A remembering of what was always there, moving quietly beneath the surface.

The Wheel Turns: Ostara and the Celtic Understanding of Return

For the ancient Celtic peoples, the year was a wheel — and every point on that wheel was sacred. Ostara, celebrated at the spring equinox, marked the moment the wheel balanced: equal light, equal dark, a great cosmic inhale before the long exhale of summer.

The name Ostara comes from Eostre, a Germanic goddess of dawn and renewal — and yes, you can hear the echo of “Easter” in her name. She was associated with hares and eggs and the particular gold of early morning light. Her arrival wasn’t just a change in temperature. It was the return of the life force itself.

What I love about the Celtic and pagan understanding of seasons is that it doesn’t place humans at the center of the story. The wheel turns whether we participate consciously or not. But when we do — when we step outside, notice the light, and say yes, I feel this too — something inside us aligns with something much older than ourselves.

Listening to the Land: Indigenous Teachings on Spring

Across many Indigenous nations of North America, spring is not a season that happens to the land — it is a conversation the land initiates with those who are paying attention.

Among the Anishinaabe, the coming of spring is marked by the return of the geese — great messengers who carry news between the worlds of south and north. Their arrival signals not just warmth, but readiness. The land is speaking. Are you listening?

Many nations hold ceremonies in spring that honor the first plants, the first rains, the first thunder. These aren’t superstitious rituals — they are technologies of relationship. They are ways of saying: we see you. We are grateful. We belong to you as much as you belong to us.

I think of the sacred geometry on our grounds — the medicine wheel labyrinth at Awakening Spirit School, and at the Good Knight Castle (home of the School of Noetic Alchemy), both a medicine wheel and a heart-shaped labyrinth, each one walked by students, children, and seekers. It is not by accident that they sit outside, under open sky, anchored to the earth. The wisdom encoded in those circles is the same wisdom Indigenous peoples have carried for millennia: we are part of something cyclical, and we need to remember that regularly.

The Resurrection Story Is a Spring Story

I grew up moving between Methodist, Catholic, and Lutheran traditions. In all of them, Easter was the hinge of the whole year — the moment everything pointed toward. And Easter, of course, is a spring story.

The resurrection isn’t just a theological event. It is a spring archetype. Something enters the darkness. Something seems to be lost. And then — impossibly, miraculously — it returns. Transformed.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that cultures around the globe, without contact with one another, arrived at the same essential story at the same time of year. The death-and-return motif shows up in Persephone and Demeter. In Osiris. In the corn mothers of countless Indigenous traditions. In the Green Man of Celtic lore. The earth itself was the first teacher of resurrection.

What if your own life is telling this story right now? We just emerged from 2025 — the Year of the Wood Snakein the Chinese zodiac — a year traditionally associated with shedding, with deep internal movement, with the slow and deliberate work of releasing what no longer serves. The snake doesn’t mourn its old skin. It leaves it behind because it has already grown beyond it. And now we step into 2026: the Year of the Fire Horse, a blazing, once-in-sixty-years arrival that asks for bold movement, forward momentum, and the courage to run. What if the thing that feels like it died last year — the dream, the version of yourself, the chapter you grieved — wasn’t a loss at all? What if it was the skin you had to shed to be ready for this?

The Observer Wakes Up in Spring Too

One of the most transformative teachings I’ve encountered in my years of Wisdom Studies is what I’ve come to call the observer perspective — the part of you that can step back from reactivity and simply notice. Watch. Witness.

Here’s something I’ve discovered: that observer is easier to access in spring.

Winter has a contracting quality — and there’s beauty in that. The introspection, the stillness, the going-within. But spring invites expansion. It invites you outside, back into your senses, back into your body. And when you’re fully present in your body — when you can feel the sun on your face and smell that dark, alive earth — the observer naturally comes online.

I notice it in myself every year. Something loosens. I become more curious and less defended. My dreams get richer. My intuition gets clearer. The ancient teachers would have recognized this as exactly right — spring is a time for the inner senses to reawaken alongside the outer ones.

A Spring Practice: The First Sensing

You don’t need a ritual or a ceremony or any special knowledge to receive what spring is offering. You just need a few minutes, an outside space, and a willingness to pay attention.

Find your way outside — your yard, a park, a patch of ground anywhere. Stand or sit with your feet as close to the earth as possible. If the ground is dry enough to remove your shoes, do it.

Take three slow breaths. On each exhale, let go of wherever you just were — the screen, the list, the mental chatter.

Then simply ask — silently, or out loud — “What is waking up?”

Let the question be for the land around you and for the landscape inside you. Notice what you smell. Notice what you hear. Notice what stirs in your chest or gut. Don’t analyze it. Just receive it.

The ancient peoples who built Stonehenge, who walked the corn rows, who followed the geese north — they weren’t more spiritually gifted than you are. They were simply more practiced at paying attention.

This is the beginning of that practice. The earth is already doing her part. She’s been thawing and turning and remembering since long before any of us were here.

You just have to step outside and meet her.

—

Amy Marotz, M.Ed., is Vice President of the Good Knight Network and a guide for the Wisdom Studies program at the School of Noetic Alchemy in Stillwater, Minnesota. She has been studying Ancient Wisdom under Sophia West since 2018 and is a Reiki Master, world traveler, and homeschool advocate.

Learn more at goodknight.org or reach out at thegoodknightnetwork@gmail.com.