Friday Frivolity no. 30: Because the Spring Inside Me Rioted

Groundbreaking florals, infinite petals, van Gogh and Hockney, and the season of Earth's laughter

This is an installment in the section Friday Frivolity. Every Friday, you'll get a little micro-essay, plus a mood board, 3 things I'm currently in love with, words of wisdom from what I've been reading lately, a shimmer of poetry, a "beauty tip," and a question to spark your thought.

Apologies for not being “as punctual as the Bee to the Clover”—yet nevertheless it is here! Dear Readers, I hope you enjoy <3

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Walter Crane, The Fate of Persephone (1877)

The land where good people go when they die, whether it be called heaven or Elysium, I cannot picture except as a land of perpetual spring. Winter I love for its white stillness, its hushed quiet, the softness of its snows and its barren beauty; summer I love for the languor of sweltering heat, the long, long sun-soaked days, the sudden violent storms, the trips to Cape Cod and the feeling of shaved legs under sundresses and the smell of sunscreen and the sea; autumn I love for the crackle of leaves underfoot and the blaze of color in the branches, the ripening of apples and “mellow fruitfulness”; but it is spring that kindles my heart most of all.

Where does this joy come from? It must have hid latent in the heart, buried under a hard, cold reticence, growing in its own dark soil, fermenting with its secret life. About a week ago I was walking somewhere, and I saw three or four bright purple blooms in the dirt where there’d been nothing just a few days earlier. “Earth laughs in flowers,” says Emerson in “Hamatreya.” Spring is when the old beldam Earth becomes a child again, and she runs through the fields with flowers in the lap of her frock, birds threaded through her hair, and as her hands brush against the trunks of trees they enleaf themselves all over with green. Now at the end of March, the sky is a robin’s egg blue, pure, with only a few white cotton balls of clouds. The sun is content to linger a little longer, and the birds return to their nests and sing.

It is said that spring was created when the maiden goddess Persephone was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. The girl was playing in a glade and picking flowers with her companions, the nymphs, when Hades rose up through a chasm in the earth and spirited her away on his golden chariot, plunging down through a pool, through the bottom of the earth, all the way down to Tartarus. Persephone’s mother Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, searched night and day, end to end over the whole earth, for her daughter, but in vain. Finally, she came to the nymph Cyane in Sicily, who showed her Persephone’s ribbon, which had fallen in the pool. Aggrieved, the goddess tore at her hair and her breast, made the crops wither and the fields barren, sent cold frosts and freezing storms to the farmers. She went to Persephone’s father, Zeus, and begged for help. Zeus agreed, but Persephone had already eaten pomegranate seeds, the fruit of the underworld, and whoever eats the fruit of the underworld is bound to that realm. Negotiating between the two immortals, Zeus came to a resolution: for half the year, Persephone would live with her husband; Demeter, grieving during those months, strips the earth into barren fall and winter. For the other half, Persephone would live in the world above with her mother, and gladdened by her daughter’s return, Demeter spreads the earth with the flowers of spring and summer.

During the winter, I think that it’d be fine if the warm weather never returned, if I could just hibernate forever, huddle under the covers forever, only know the world through the window’s narrow frame. But with spring comes a new upswell of energy, a spring, as it were, in the step. I wrote a couplet for a sonnet once that went, “Because the spring inside me rioted, / I knew that life could not be quieted.” Now that the equilibrium between day and night tilts towards day, I want to wear pastels and bake cakes, play the violin again, go on long walks through the fields and woods. The earth will renew itself in gladness; flowers will bloom in my heart.

Mood Board of the Week

(left to right, top to bottom)

1. Stamps posted by thatbitchsimone on Tumblr: These stamps from across the world—Indonesia, Ethiopia, Bolivia—capture flowers across cultures and in all their happy variety.

2. David Ost, Leafing Through Flowers (2000): In Leafing Through Flowers, photographs capture Belgian floral artist Daniel Ost’s strange, unusual, and unconventional flower arrangements, like this one here, where bulbs on long, long, long stems surge upwards against a claustrophobic canopy of leaves, as though still trapped under the ground.

   

   flower arrangement by Daniel Ost, from Leafing Through Flowers (2000)

3. Vincent van Gogh, The White Orchard (1888): In February 1888, Van Gogh left the busy, tiresome city of Paris for the quiet, peaceful countryside of Arles. In the spring of 1888, he began painting the blossoming orchards he saw, producing fourteen canvases over the course of a month. These paintings are full of movement and life—the trees here, their branches laden with fresh green, almost seem to stir in the wind.

   

   Vincent van Gogh, The Pink Orchard and Peach Tree in Blossom (1888)

4. Laetitia Casta for YSL Spring/Summer 1999: Couture shows traditionally have their grand finale with a bridal look, and French model Laetitia Casta, being the last muse of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, was the bride in his collections from 1998 to 2001. In his Spring 1999 show, Laurent eschewed the usual white, cream, ivory, and alabaster for a riot of pink roses, trimmed with green leaves and completed with a pale pink silk train. She wore a crown of roses, and roses decorated her heels. Think a primeval bride in an Edenic paradise, the goddess Flora, Persephone just before her abduction.

5. David Hockney, from The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate (2011): David Hockney is best known for his paintings of swimming pools, inspired by his time in California, but in the 2000s he went back to the UK and embraced the natural landscape of northern England, especially in this series, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate. I love it when older artists are unafraid of embracing new technologies, and here Hockney used an iPad to capture the riotous beauty of spring. In an interview by the Van Gogh Museum for an exhibition on the two artists, you can see the pure joy on Hockney’s face when he describes the minute subtleties of nature that come alive when you just take the time to look, and I’m sure Van Gogh would agree with him when he says, “You can’t be bored of nature, can you?”

   

   

   David Hockney, from The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate (2011)

6. Rosalind Burdett, Interior Design Ideas: Inside an English Home (1988): When it comes to interior design for springtime, how can you beat floral wallpaper, a floral bathtub, a floral tablecloth, and a few bunches of flowers just to really drive the message home?

7. Claude Monet, An Orchard in Spring (1886): A woman sits reading in a flowering orchard; behind her bloom rows of purple flowers. I think Impressionism was made for spring—no style of art seems to capture it so fully, so beautifully, so alive in its movement and stirring and gaiety and vivacity.

8. Sarah Meyohas, Infinite Petals (2023): Artist Sarah Meyohas trained a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network, a precursor to AI) on a dataset of 100,000 actual rose petals. The GAN would then generate new, unique rose petals, endlessly, which were displayed in a video installation. These infinite petals give me a feeling of infinite spring, bringing together nature and technology to create an abundance of beauty.

9. Éric Rohmer, A Tale of Springtime (1990): In this first installment of his loose series Tales of the Four Seasons (characters, plots, settings all change from film to film, though themes provide a through line) Rohmer showcases the beauty of early spring through scenes of Paris and scenes of the countryside: warm pops of colors and florals in characters’ apartments, a fresh vase of tall white blossoms, begging to be sniffed, an orchard in flower like a Van Gogh painting. I’ve written more fully about this movie here.

   

   A Tale of Springtime (1990)

Three Things I’m In Love With This Week

1. Inside a Storied Artist Residence Nestled within the Historic National Arts Club by Homeworthy: Homeworthy has become one of my favorite YouTube channels, and recently it showcased the National Arts Club, which is located in Gramercy Park in New York City. Inside this storied structure is an apartment, which is currently occupied by its third resident, the portrait painter Michael Shane Neal. Both the clubhouse and the apartment are filled with remarkable artworks, furniture, and decorative objects, and I very nearly let out an audible gasp when the camera panned up to Donald MacDonald’s vast, intricate, beautiful stained glass dome.

   

   stained glass ceiling of the National Arts Club, via Wikimedia Commons

2. Raspberry Pistachio Cake by teak & thyme: If you’ve been hanging out on the Internet, you may have seen an uptick in recipes featuring pistachios. Before the 1980s, most pistachios sold in the US were imported from Iran and the Middle East. For political reasons, farmers in California were encouraged to grow pistachios, which require vast quantities of water. To shore up the American pistachio industry, pistachios are now being pushed front and center—it seems there are also some theories about a shadowy billionaire couple and a hoarding of water supply. Anyway, nut intrigues aside, I think pistachios are delicious, and I love the pink and green colors of this raspberry pistachio cake, which looks so bright and pretty and perfect for spring. I love how vintage styles of cake decorating are returning, and I love the little bows used to decorate this cake. I used to bake a lot, and now I’m inspired to start baking again and create beautiful sweet treats and confections for my loved ones.

3. A meditation on the spring, Rambler no. 5, April 3, 1750, by Samuel Johnson: In these musings upon the start of springtime, the always erudite Dr. Johnson writes that “[h]e that enlarges his curiosity after the works of nature, demonstrably multiplies the inlets to happiness,” and what better time is there to read nature’s works than spring?

Words of Wisdom

Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.

—Vincent van Gogh

Maison Van Gogh in Cuesmes, via Wikipedia

Van Gogh wrote this letter to his brother Theo in mid-August of 1879, at the age of 26, from the Belgian village of Cuesmes. Van Gogh had come to the Borinage, an area of Belgium centered around coal mining, to work as a missionary. Embracing his religious vocation and the lifestyle of his congregation of poor miners, he slept on straw in a humble hut, had stopped bathing, and had given up most of his clothes and money to the miners, but the vocation would prove fraught with difficulties and disappointments. In this letter, Vincent thanks Theo for a recent visit, which gave him the reassurance that “life is something good and precious which one should value.” He talks about how devastating the effects of loneliness are and how important one’s relationships with others—“Like everyone else, I need friendly or affectionate relationships or intimate companionship, and am not made of stone or iron like a pump or a lamppost.” Living in the Borinage had been trying for Vincent (“the worst time I have ever lived through”), and having already gone through several changes of profession, he despaired at finding a trade. Yet it was in Cuesmes that he was to finally realize his calling as a painter and take up, definitively, the paintbrush and the painter’s palette.

Poetry Corner

Claude McKay, looking very springlike

After the Winter

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
     And against the morning’s white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
     Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
     Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
     And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
     Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
     And works the droning bee,
And we will build a cottage there
     Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
     And ferns that never fade.

—Claude McKay

A convicted orchid-lover, I especially love McKay’s image of “wide-mouthed orchids smil[ing].” The image of building a cottage by a glade reminds me so much of Yeats’s “bee-loud glade” from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” where the speaker plans to live in “a small cabin… of clay and wattles made.” However, while Yeats’s speaker plans to inhabit his gladeside abode alone, McKay envisions it more as a bower of springtime bliss for himself and his love. Having recently become espoused, I’m persuaded to side with McKay.

Beauty Tip

by Julyssa Rose

I saw this lovely idea in a YouTube video by Julyssa Rose—string together fabric flowers (her flowers are vintage, which adds to their romance) with brass wire and hang them up as an easy decoration for spring!

Lingering Question

It has often been remarked that it would be more apt for the New Year to begin in the spring rather than in the winter, for spring is a thing of beginnings. Now that we are nearly a quarter of the way through 2025, I’d like to ask, dear readers—do you feel a sense of hope and newness more around the New Year or more around the start of spring?

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Dear Readers, what is spring like in your part of the world, and how are you feeling at the start of this spring? Let me know in the comments, and please like this post & subscribe to Soul-Making if you enjoyed!