February is not a month.
February is a reckoning.
February is the place where the year holds its breath and decides — *will anything survive this* — and the answer, every time, is yes, but the asking takes the whole of February to complete, which is why February feels so long even though it is the shortest.
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I have spent many Februaries at the bottom.
February 13th, 2014 — the day I understand now was not an ending but a beginning dressed so completely in ending that I could not see through it. The day I picked up a camera instead. The day the self-portraits began. The day the bluebell wood became my studio and the frost became my collaborator and I became, without planning to, an artist.
The daffodil was already underground. I just didn't know it yet.
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February teaches one thing and one thing only:
*That what looks like death is often just winter.*
That the bulb is not gone — it is waiting. That the bluebell is not gone — it is underground, doing the slow invisible work of returning. That you are not gone — you are in the part of the year that precedes the bloom, which is necessary, which is real, which is not the same as over.
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I am February-born.
Not in the calendar sense — I arrived in a different month, a summer month, all light and no patience.
But in the soul sense: I was born in a February. I was made in the cold and the held breath and the *will anything survive this.*
And then I bloomed.
*And I have been blooming, in one form or another, ever since.*