March can be been wild for me. Has it been wild for you? Long warm stretches of dry days. No rain, no snow but so much wind in the month of heaviest precipitation for the Front Range of Colorado. March is always a wild weather month but this year the typical tumult is amplified on a national and global scale. The ruckus of 2025 inspired me down a rabbit hole to connect with deep time. What could history teach me? “The Ides of March” — that phrase haunted me — what did the ancients mean by that?
It turns out that the Romans marked time, not with numbers, but with named days: the Kalends (the first), the Nones (the fifth or seventh), and the Ides (the fifteenth).
The Ides of March is associated with the famous warning, “Beware the Ides of March,” spoken to Julius Caesar by a seer, specifically a haruspex who divined the future by examining animal entrails. According to Shakespeare, the haruspex warned Caesar of his impending assassination. Does that sound crazier than what is happening these days? Reading animal entrails to foretell the future? At least the entrails weren’t those of a virgin on an altar under a full moon.
Further down the rabbit hole, I read about the augurs and auspices, seers who found meaning in weather patterns and the flight of birds. These ancients don’t feel so foreign to my own mentality. Paradoxically, I have found some comfort in the fact that the world has always been chaotic, full of those of us searching for meaning and others who take direction from a variety of unfolding phenomena.
Unlike frozen February, which I sardonically say is the longest month, March swings wildly between moments of spring promise and storm clouds. One moment I’m having lunch on a terrace and the next I'm driving home in a windstorm, watching the trees do the watusi in the gale. Though I don’t read the future in these occurrences, they do bring my attention back into the present.
In my garden, the crocuses and dwarf irises have emerged — persistent declarations of life's continuance. They remind me that our surest path forward isn't frantically trying to predict or control the future, but reconnecting with what's immediately here.
For me, that means digging in the dirt — planting greens, carrots, peas, and beets. It means designing spaces where others can experience that same grounding connection to the earth. This spring, I find myself embracing this philosophy more deeply than ever. While the ground beneath us may shift, it remains our most reliable source of stability. We come from it, return to it, and in between, we have the privilege of shaping it into spaces of beauty and meaning.
To all the Springs to come, and all that have come before — I’m ready for you.
