Finding the Soul of the Season—Spring Equinox

Finding the Soul of the Season—Spring Equinox

Sap is rising, nectar is flowing—pollination, the great giving and receiving exchange of fertilization springs to life again! In the eco-spirituality, or spiritual ecology, of the spring season we witness some of nature’s archetypal connecting energies and explore what is going on within our own physical, emotional, and spiritual vitalities as we approach the spring equinox.

In life’s Book of Interconnections, this is a story about the spring ephemerals—the bloodroots, spring beauties, toothworts, trilliums, and Dutchmen’s britches that spring up to absorb the sunlight and convert it into needed nutrients before the trees leaf out and shade the forest floor. In particular, this is a story that the trout lilies tell us about living an interrelational life, which helps us counter Western culture’s insistence on telling us fictitious accounts of individuality and separation.

Trout lilies are our native version of the sweet-smelling narcissus of Greek myths. Their bright yellow flowers light up the forest floor and attract some of the very earliest bees to pollinate them. A bright narcissus attracted Persephone to pick it, and this caused her to be noticed by Hades who abducted her, taking her down to become his Queen of the Underworld, the realm of the dead. Demeter, goddess of fertility and vegetation, could not live with this disconnection from her daughter. She never stopped searching, thus causing a great famine, until she found Persephone and they were reunited, reconnected again. We notice that the theme of interconnection is emphasized in the myth in that Demeter is not alone in her search. Both Hecate and the Sun have witnessed the abduction and come to Demeter’s aid.

Spring ephemerals grow in bottomland deciduous forests like this one here at Temenos garden and for a ways up the mesic slopes, like the beech slope along the creek, Buck Branch. In the brief span of warming before the trees’ leaves emerge to block the sunlight, these flowers manufacture their entire year’s food supply, store it in an underground bulb or tuber, bloom, set seed, and go dormant. They are tolerant of cold and may even push through a late snow to bloom.

Trout lilies (Erythronium umbellatum and E. americanum) grow in the open, deciduous woods of the mountains and Piedmont. Folk wisdom says that their leaves are mottled like trout, they grow near (trout) streams, and they emerge in early spring when trout begin to bite. Once the plants have grown for many years and finally emerge with two leaves, they flower. Their bulb-like storage structures, called corms, can be eaten raw or cooked and used medicinally as well.

While the spring ephemerals are connected to the earliest pollinators, the bees, they are also connected to the ants of the forest floor—who would usually eat the bodies of other little insects, but this early in the spring time, other creepy-crawlies are not yet present. The various families of these earliest flowering plants each independently evolved a way to attract ants to disperse their seeds far and wide by attaching to each seed a small, nutritious globule of fat, called an elaiosome. The ants gather the ripe seeds and take them to their nests, where they feed this little food body to their larva. The unharmed seeds get discarded in the ants’ waste heap, which contains a lot of nutrients and acts like a fertile compost, a loose, crumbly bed of soil. Thus the seeds are planted rather than eaten by the birds, and the ants spread the flowers throughout the alluvial forest.

More threads of connection: trout lily roots are attached to mycorrhizal fungi, which form the great webs of interconnection in the soil. In the fall, sugar maple saplings transfer carbohydrates down into the wood-wide network, thereby helping to feed the underground storage corms of the trout lilies’ roots. In the spring, the fungal network brings water and nutrients up from the soil, up through the roots, to the flowers. In turn, being early absorbers and converters of the sun’s energy, the leaves of the trout lilies contribute sugars to the root networks of the sugar maple trees to support their growth.

After trout lilies have flowered, one can observe strange white squiggles crawling among the leaves of the forest floor. These are characters in another chapter of the story of connection that the trout lilies tell. Called droppers, they extend from the corms and form a new corm on the end. Somehow sensing the depth and density of the soil, they plant themselves either much farther down or closer to the surface as needed. These droppers with their new corms weave together the creekside forest, holding the soil firm against erosion and sending up new leaves the following spring.

Demeter is the bright goddess of grains and the summer harvest while Persephone is the queen of darkness, symbolizing the collective unconscious, dreams, intuition, and embodied wisdom. So the bodies of the flowers are like the body of Persephone, seeds separated from the mother plant, Demeter, taken down into the deep source of life to do their own maturing, to gain their own forms of consciousness—to draw water up from the underground springs and become entwined with the true root-source of sustenance—deeper than the personal mother—Mother Earth. Spring is a time to ask if we are drawing our energies from the vastest sources of the light of the great Above and the fruitful darkness of the Below.

The Mysteries of Eleusis, a Sanctuary near Athens, incorporated the archetypal image of Mother and Daughter, the feminine source of life, of the Self that is so much larger and interconnected than the isolated, personal ego. Although no celebrants ever revealed the secret rituals, for nearly 2,000 years, men and women came from all over the world to Eleusis to receive profound visions, to experience the ritual embodiment of a myth of death and rebirth and the great “festival of flowering,” which celebrated the nourishment humans receive from plants, the apparent death of the natural world in winter, and the ultimate renewal of life when Demeter and Persephone are reunited.

The abduction and rape of Persephone has been likened to the destruction of the virginal old growth forests. The body, the forest, is the lost goddess, the devalued feminine that we must bring to consciousness and name, and take responsibility for re-valuing and restoring our web of connection with Mother Earth.

Notes:
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, a translation from Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica by Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Harvard University Press, 1914) now in the public domain. Or The Homeric Hymns: A Translation by Diane J. Rayor (University of California Press, 2004).

Annkatrin Rose, “The Secret Lives of Spring Ephemerals: Trout Lily Edition,” Native Plant News, Spring 2026, February 18, 2026, ncwildflower.org/the-secret-lives-of-spring-ephemerals-trout-lily-edition/