Spring Escalation
When Everything Starts Moving at Once
I. Escalation
I recently had a birthday.
It came in quietly, which is what I needed. No insistence that it mark a turning point. No demand that I account for anything beyond the simple fact of being here another year.
But here we are. Another birthday marked by the beginning of war. Another spring that marks the ending of winter and ushers in the tension and expectation of summer.
Late March. Early spring. The point in the year where things start moving whether you’re ready or not.
There’s a pattern I’ve noticed over time. Not exact enough to map cleanly, but steady enough that I don’t question the feeling of it anymore. Every decade of my life holds at least one year where something breaks open around this time. A conflict beginning. Or intensifying. Or shifting into something that can’t be contained in the same way.
I don’t experience it as coincidence.
Spring carries momentum. What has been building finds a way forward.
We’re taught to read this season as gentle. As renewal, return, softness after a long winter. And some of that is real. Things grow. Things come back. There is beauty in this, of course.
But there is also brutality.
Growth has a trajectory without morality. War follows that logic. Spring doesn’t decide what should flourish; it creates the conditions for movement. Conditions shift. Movement becomes possible. Decisions land. Lines sharpen.
Escalation has a season.
And once you start to recognize it, it becomes harder to separate what feels like a global pattern from the way it settles into your own sense of time.
II. Acceleration
That same shift is visible much closer to the body.
The pace has changed.
People I have known for years are appearing in new bodies between one season and the next. The timeline collapses into something shorter, tighter. A few months. Sometimes less. Photos that don’t match memory. Encounters that require a second look, not because anything is unfamiliar, but because the speed of it disrupts recognition.
It’s patterned.
Bodies getting smaller, quickly enough that the change feels ambient. Less like a series of individual decisions and more like a coordinated shift in one direction. Shrinking as a shared project.
The visual field moves with it. What shows up on screens, in rooms, across feeds recalibrates. The range of acceptable narrows, then resets. A body that once read as normal starts to read as excessive. A body that might have once stood out now passes without comment.
The baseline moves. And once it moves, everything reorganizes around it.
Time, effort, and expectation compress into outcomes that arrive faster than they used to. Faster than they are easy to process. Fast enough that the question of why gets overtaken by the fact of what is.
Thinness circulates as improvement. As discipline. As care. As health.
But the direction is consistent. Smaller. Tighter. Contained. Easier to manage. Easier to read. Easier to accept inside systems that have always required certain bodies to take up less space.
I can feel that shift working on me. A glance that lingers. A moment of recalibration before entering a room. The quiet accounting that happens after leaving one.
What am I being asked to become?
What disappears if I don’t comply?
Who benefits when the standard moves?
Those questions don’t arrive fully formed, but they do accumulate. Acceleration doesn’t stay external. It reorganizes the conditions we move through, until the change starts to feel inevitable.
Spring brings that forward. What might have unfolded slowly now arrives all at once. What stayed at the edges moves to the center. The pace becomes part of the expectation.
This was never about health. At least, not in the way we keep being told.
III. Exposure
Spring has a way of surfacing what has been held in place.
The thaw doesn’t create anything new. It alters the conditions enough that what was contained begins to show.
The information surrounding Epstein continues to surface. The network comes into clearer focus. Power, money, access, and exploitation move together in ways that are harder to ignore, even as attention is pulled elsewhere, redirected, diffused.
Exposure doesn’t land evenly.
Some names circulate. Some fade. Some are carried forward long enough to register; others disappear before consequence can attach.
It moves outward… and inward.
It reaches into movements that shaped how many of us understand justice in the first place.
Dolores Huerta recently spoke about being sexually assaulted by César Chávez. This was something she lived with for years while continuing to build and sustain the work they were part of. And she is not the only one; many women bitterly swallowed their pain in service to “the cause.”
That kind of disclosure doesn’t resolve cleanly. It doesn’t collapse the movement into the harm, and it doesn’t leave the movement untouched either.
It changes the terrain.
What gets protected in order to sustain collective work? What gets deferred? Who gets to become a charismatic leader? What does it cost to hold both truth and legacy at once?
Spring exposes that as well. Not only individuals, but the structures and histories that have shaped our understanding of what is worth building, and at what cost.
IV. Activation
Escalation, acceleration, and exposure are not separate movements. They are happening at the same time, each one altering and expanding the conditions the others move inside. While things are unpredictable, the pattern dictates that the intensity and challenges will also expand.
The distance between them feels thinner than it used to. What happens at one scale registers at another. The global and the intimate no longer hold the same boundaries they once did.
There is a pull to move with that pace. To respond quickly. To adjust in real time to conditions that continue shifting.
I notice it in small moments.
Walking into a room and feeling the scan before it finishes. Noticing who registers me immediately and who doesn’t. Deciding, in real time, how much space to take up, how quickly to speak, whether to soften or hold.
That’s part of the movement too.
Another kind of movement is available. Not outside of this, but inside it.
Attention becomes a form of participation. So does timing. So does the decision to act with intention rather than reflex, to notice what is being asked and decide, consciously, what to take up and what to leave behind.
Sitting just past my birthday, I’m aware that I am inside that movement as much as I am observing it. I don’t get to opt out of the season. I do get to decide how I move within it.
Some things I will move toward. Some things I will meet with more time, more scrutiny, more care. And some things, even now, I am choosing not to carry forward.
Spring is here. Everything is in motion.
And not everything that moves is meant to be followed.
If something in this piece caught or stayed with you, I’d be curious what you’re noticing in your own world right now.
Under This Moon
Full Moon in Libra — April 1, 2026
Stone / Card / Object: Rose quartz (relational clarity), Justice (balance, consequence), Mirror (reflection without distortion)
This moon doesn’t introduce anything new. It reveals what’s already in motion.
Spring is accelerating. Not gently, not metaphorically. Things are moving faster than they were meant to. What was contained is now visible. What was theoretical is now personal.
Libra doesn’t slow that down. It sharpens it.
This is a relational moon, but not in the soft sense. Not connection for its own sake. This is about tension. Reciprocity. The point where something tips and can’t pretend to be balanced anymore.
And it’s not happening in isolation.
We’re in the final stretch of a long Mercury retrograde cycle, with the fog only just beginning to lift. Clarity is arriving, but unevenly. Some things snap into focus while others are still distorted.
At the same time, April doesn’t calm down after this moon—it escalates.
Pressure builds quickly over the next two weeks. Expansion meets friction as the Sun squares Jupiter. Urgency meets reality. And by mid-month, as Mars enters Aries, the energy turns decisively toward action, initiation, and forward motion.
For many people, this will feel like a flash-point.
Not because something new is happening, but because what has been building can’t stay contained anymore.
You may notice where things have already escalated:
A conversation that didn’t stay small.
A boundary that didn’t hold.
A dynamic that suddenly feels exposed.
That’s not a mistake.
There’s a particular kind of clarity available right now. Not peaceful clarity. Not resolved clarity. The kind that comes from seeing the imbalance plainly and realizing you can’t unsee it.
At the same time, the impulse to act is rising. Fast decisions. Clean cuts. Immediate correction. Some of that is real. Some of that is reaction.
You don’t need to rush to resolve what has only just become visible. Let the exposure land first.
Because this is the part people skip.
They see the imbalance and immediately try to fix it, smooth it, justify it, or burn it down.
But this moment is asking for something more precise than that.
Discernment.
What is actually out of balance?
What has been out of balance for a while?
What are you trying to restore, and what are you trying to escape?
The answers are closer than you think. But they’re quieter than the urgency.
Ritual / Reflection
Say this out loud:
“This is where it stops.”
Pause.
Then finish the sentence without thinking:
“From here forward, I…”
One line. No explanation.
That’s your shift.
Shards and Fragments
The ancient Greeks had a saying:
θέρος, τρύγος, πόλεμος.
Théros, trýgos, pólemos.
“Summer, harvest, war.“
Weather Report
It’s Fool’s Spring here in Oregon. The brief stretch that follows First Winter and precedes Second Winter.
Rain. Su—nope, more rain.
The ground softens anyway.
What’s In Motion
I’ve stepped into an Interim Executive Director role at Call to Safety (formerly the Portland Women’s Crisis Line). The work is immediate and structural at the same time. Call to Safety is marking Sexual Assault Awareness Month this April with a series of local events.
In Hourglass Sessions, I’ve been noticing how often clarity arrives before people can actually move. The question becomes how long they’re expected to wait once they already know. And what it costs to stay still in the meantime.
A new Body Trust Podcast episode is coming soon with The Ragen Chastain, writer of the the brilliant Weight and Healthcare substack. The conversation sits at the intersection of bodies, science, power, and what gets framed as health and care.
Further Reflection
What are you being asked to move with right now, and what would it look like to refuse that pace?
happy belated, Sirius. this spring is indeed all thawing rivers at once. feels like something we can only approach through lyric and poem and layers. thank you for approaching it.
beautiful!