Compost | May

A cornucopia of swifts and Self Esteem, internal seasons that don't always align with the external season, mothering as a verb and as a container, connection, and a surprising amount of poetry

May 11, 2025

This is the fifth instalment of my monthly compost posts: a round up of life currently, some short pieces of life writing, my bird of the month, a tarot card or reading for the month, plus potentially some thoughts on things I’m currently reading/ watching/ listening to.

Springtime Sadness

I usually reach a point in the spring, often in early May, when I suddenly feel anxious and overwhelmed by how lush and green the world has become. Everywhere is a riot of life and growth, and it feels like time is moving too fast. I want it to stop, or at least slow down a little so I can savour each new stage of spring: the daffodils going over and being replaced by the tulips; the dandelions that are already turning to seedheads; the magnolia tree in the garden; the cherry blossom that starts to fall almost as soon as it opens; the lilacs I pass when I’m out running.

It’s hard to enjoy the moment when it feels like new moments are stacking up one after the other, the world constantly changing as the springtime races past me, too fast to hold on to. A few weeks ago I was admiring the sudden spray of blossom on the bare branches of the blackthorns and watching the leaf buds swelling - almost, almost opening but not quite yet. Now suddenly nearly all the trees are in leaf and the hawthorn blossom is here. It feels like someone pressed fast forward on the season.

In previous years I’ve clung to a Philip Larkin poem, The Trees, which catches something of the sadness and ambivalence I’ve felt at this time of year. I don’t want to feel this way - I love the springtime with all its colours and new life - but there’s something about all the abundance and rapid growth that has made me melancholy. Early spring is fine, when it’s the promise of the season to come and the early signs - snowdrops and crocuses, the slow creeping of daylight into the evenings and my early morning writing sessions, the blackbird announcing the dawn from the bush by the gate. But something about full, vibrant spring is overwhelming and I’ve found myself almost averting my eyes from it, waiting for June when I can safely say it’s summer and pack away my confusing sadness until next year.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greeness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

The Trees by Philip Larkin

But so far this year I haven’t felt that anxiety and sadness. I’m almost disappointed because this year, rather than trying to ignore my feelings or pretend I wasn’t feeling them, I was curious and ready to explore why I feel melancholy in late spring. Instead, I’m left wondering what’s changed this year, why this spring the lime green burst of the new beech leaves brings a smile to my face rather than a bittersweet ache to my chest. The only difference between last year and this year that I can think of is that this spring I’m writing - both for myself and for an audience (hello! 👋). I’ve stopped waiting for the perfect circumstances in which to write (when I have a room of my own, when the children are a little older, when I have an uninterrupted afternoon) and just started writing whenever I can, wherever I can. I’ve made writing a part of my messy life, allowed it to be one of the conflicting priorities competing for my attention rather than waiting for some mythical point in the future when I could focus on it ‘properly’.

And so I’m wondering whether part of my melancholy around the vibrant rush of life and colour of late spring in previous years is because I felt as though I was somehow outside it. Separated somehow from the abundance of the season. Life was passing me by in a way: the world was green and growing and seizing the moment while I was still lying dormant, waiting. I was feeling a need and a desire to write, but I was resisting it, so it felt painful to see the world around me not resisting, but joyfully bursting into life and growth. This year I’m writing (I might even dare to call myself a writer one of these days!) so perhaps I’m able to enjoy the season more because my inside world better matches the outside world. This year I’m also growing and putting out new leaves - I like the idea of thinking of these posts as each being a new leaf or flower, an offering.

Who’s Holding Me?

I’ve been listening to Self Esteem’s new album A Complicated Woman on repeat this week, mainly when I’m in the car by myself because it is quite sweary and my children are unexpectedly prudish about ‘bad’ language. In a funny way, it reminds me of the M People and Lighthouse Family albums I listened to on repeat in my mid teens: good tunes, good rhythms, excellent to sing along to, but also lyrics that make me think or offer a different perspective on how to approach life and the world. In my more cynical moments I’ve described the Lighthouse Family and M People as self-help music, which isn’t quite fair. It’s maybe more accurate to say that there’s a universality to their lyrics: there’s something in them that anyone and everyone can identify with. I’m finding that same energy with the Self Esteem album - I’ve scribbled down so many lines and lyrics, there’s so much in it that speaks to me in the moment of life I’m in right now.

“Who’s holding me?” is a line from the track Mother (h/t to

Layla O'Mara

for linking to this track in her recent post you are invited to a mulch meeting and making me realise that the new album was out). I think it sums up a lot of what I’ve been grappling with in the (almost) ten years since my mum’s death. In the absence of my mother, who is holding me? How am I learning to hold others, to be a mother, in Mum’s absence? Being held, being mothered is an ‘I’ve got you’, a ‘don’t be scared’, an “I’m here for you’, and ‘it will be alright’. I don’t have that anymore, but I do offer it and enact it for others, most of all for my own children. I am still held, in different ways, by different people (my dad, my husband, my brother, my children, in person and online friends and communities1) but none of it is the same as the way I was held by Mum.

There’s a different energy to mothering and to fathering - or at least there’s a different energy to the way I was mothered and fathered. Mum was a container, holding me and my emotions, fears, desires, dreams. Dad is a support - a tree maybe - external to me but offering shelter and protection. Both are (or were) a source of safety and stability, and I’m aware of how lucky I am to have such strong, largely straightforward relationships with both of my parents. I see my relationship with Dad as being more head-based, words and communication: sharing our thoughts and opinions on a book we’ve both read, a new album, arguing over politics. My relationship with Mum was more based in the body, at its root a joy in spending time together, the sensory experience of each other in the world: sight, sounds, smells, taste, touch. About holding each other, holding space for each other.

Thinking about being held, and about what we hold of course makes me think of

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

’s beautiful, punch-in-the-guts poem During Genocide, The Women Hold Things, which you can read here. It is also published in the BODY issue of

Genevieve Beech

’s motherlore magazine.

Hopes.
Dreams.
The knowledge that this is not how it should be.
During genocide, women hold things.

Kites.
Flags.
Silence.
Screaming.
Memories.

Their hearts, close and closer still.
Room inside them for more.
More heart.
More heart wide open.
During genocide, women hold things.

extract from During Genocide, The Women Hold Things by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

Mothering is about holding things. Mothering is a verb, it’s something we all do - or can do - whether we are mothers or not, men as well as women. It’s holding babies, children, other people, things, ideas, actions, space, time. Like in the image below from the picture book Meet The Parents by Peter Bently and Sara Ogilvie, which sums up so much of my experience of parenting small children in one double page spread.

I can *feel* the progression of this walk home in my bones, as the Mum goes from carrying two shopping bags; to two shopping bags, a teddy and a coat; to two shopping bags, a scooter, a coat, a hat and the Child (also a nice touch that the Child is carrying the teddy at the end!)

Thinking about who is (or isn’t) holding me, and who or what I am holding, is also helping me to think about why it’s only now - 10 years later - that I’m sitting down to write about the 18 month period in which Mum died, I became pregnant, and my younger son was born. Mum died, and I was consumed by my role as a container for my children - pretty literally in the case of my younger son. I carried him for the entire first year after Mum’s death, through 9 months of pregnancy when I literally made space for him inside my own body, and into the 4th trimester, those first newborn months when the boundary between mother and baby is porous and blurred. I haven’t had the time or space until recently to write about that time, I’ve been holding my children, learning how to hold myself, trying and failing and trying again.

But my children are older now, needing me less or in different ways. I’m no longer physically holding them as much. Writing this memoir about those 18 months is part of me learning to hold myself. Sitting with myself as I remember what it was like to live through those days and weeks and months. Integrating those memories into my sense of who I am now in a way I maybe haven’t been able to until now. Telling a story - this is what it was like for me to experience death and life within 9 months, the death of my mother, the birth of my child.

Connection and Abundance

Continuing my pattern over the last few months of offering a tarot card whose meaning is linked to what I’ve been writing about, rather than a tarot reading, this month’s card is the Empress. It’s the card in the major arcana that most embodies the mother archetype, the act of mothering. It’s also associated with nature and abundance, with fertility and growth, with seasons and cycles, with care - caring for yourself, caring for others, being cared for. It offers a reminder that things take the time they need to take: you plant the seeds, you nurture the seeds, and you then you must wait for them to grow and blossom in their own time. Life - or death, or creativity - is a slow, organic process, and it can’t be rushed. It’s also a cycle - everything is a cycle, no clear beginning or end - and everything will come around again. What you have, you will lose. What you lose, you will regain. Everything ebbs and flows. The Empress is also an embodied card. It’s about connection - with yourself, with others, with the world, with the seasons. The ways you physically engage with the world through your body, all the sensory pleasures of being embodied - touch, taste, smell, sound, sight.

Bird of the Month: Swift

Apus apus, Gwennol Ddu

A fossil of *Scaniacypselus*, an extinct genus of swift from around 49 million years ago, found in Darmstadt, Germany (image from Wikipedia)

May is the month when the swifts return to Britain and Ireland. I was beginning to worry that I wouldn’t have seen any by the time I pressed publish on this post, but then two days ago I looked up on a sunny evening in the garden and there they were, tiny boomerang shapes looping and weaving high overhead. The return of the swifts to our skies is one of the signs of summer; screaming swifts, devil birds, speeding past at around 70mph. They weigh less than a hen’s egg and appear to be 90% wings and mouth. A tiny scrap of life that travels up to 14,000 miles a year, migrating from near the equator as far north as Scandinavia and Siberia as the days lengthen to breed and raise their young, before making the same journey in reverse as the nights draw in. Swifts spend around three months of each year in the northern hemisphere, three in the southern, and five months in transit, travelling through the spaces in between.

Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for
Earth is forbidden to them, water's forbidden to them,
All air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms,
They rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains.

extract from Swifts by Anne Stevenson

They spend almost their entire lives in flight. Swifts sleep, eat, bathe and mate on the wing, only landing to lay their eggs and raise their young. Swifts who are not raising young may spend up to 10 months at a time in one, long continuous flight. The only solid ground a swift will touch in its lifetime is their nest site, which is likely to be high up, in a crevice in the roof of a house or church, perhaps in an old woodpecker’s nest near the top of a tree. They mate for life, returning to the same nest site and the same partner each spring. There’s something prehistoric in their appearance, and indeed swifts are an ancient species: fossils of birds almost indistinguishable from modern swifts have been found and dated to around 49 million years ago.

Their Latin name, Apus apus, comes from the Greek word ápous, meaning without foot, footless. Because they spend so much of their lives in the air, because most people will only see swifts in motion, soaring overhead, they were once thought to lack feet. Their Welsh name, Gwennol ddu, means ‘black swallow’, reflecting the visual similarities between swifts, swallows (Gwennol) and house martins (Gwennol y bondo, ‘swallow of the eaves’), though they are not closely related. The word gwennol can be translated as both ‘swallow’ and ‘shuttle’ - originally as in the tool used in weaving on a loom but now also used to refer to a badminton shuttlecock or a shuttle bus (bws gwennol). I love the way the Welsh names for these birds references their movement, shuttling back and forth in the sky above us as they scoop up insects.

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialize at the tip of a long scream
Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone
On a steep

Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

extract from Swifts by Ted Hughes

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