There's a moment each spring, here on the Peninsula, when the air changes before anything else does. The light softens, the mornings smell of damp earth and new growth, and something in me — something old, something that remembers every spring before this one — starts to stir. In alchemy, spring isn't simply a season. It's an instruction. It is the element of Air awakening after Winter's stillness, the exhale after months of held breath. And just as the land renews itself, so
