Wood Spirit Ostara Breath

The first spring rains washed the forest clean, and the frozen earth breathed freely once more. The sky became truly spring — bright blue. The whole forest was covered in the dark velvet of darkening soil. The trees still rustled with bare branches, rocking empty nests. A few more days, a week — and all this disorder would begin to hide itself in the weightless greenish haze of young leaves. But for now the spring streams rippled with quiet laughter down sunlit but still-empty slopes. The newly arrived birds sang along with them: "Did you hear, did you hear? — the meadow larks chattered without pause — he is coming, and spring comes with him!" This news rolled through the forest in a joyful wave.

A gentle wind played lightly in his long fur, weaving into it the scents of wet earth and moss, of sharp buds on the trees — the scents of spring. The Wood Spirit Ostara's Breath had always sensed it unerringly, by some ancient instinct of his own. Even now he looked into the high sky, listened to the wind, and felt awakened nature everywhere. The Wood Spirit remembered his first, so very distant spring. How he walked in the light of the still-young sun beneath young trees. Everything was filled with the radiance of golden rays, the blue of heaven gave way to pink at sunset, and each morning new green leaves opened. Before this the Wood Spirit had seen only the white world of icy winter. And so he was enchanted by the nature that had blazed into life. In that moment his name came to him — the Reborn Forest. The Wood Spirit became the keeper of spring and now comes to the forest each year to bring radiant joy along with young leaves and the first tender flowers.

Right now Ostara's Breath is carrying a basket full of spring primroses: crocuses, muscari, snowdrops, pasque flowers. He will plant them on sunny hillsides so that the flowers spread and decorate the whole forest with a bright tapestry.

In his paw the spring keeper holds a glass globe. Inside it shelters a tiny green sprout — it will give the first impulse to the vigorous growth of all grasses. On the Wood Spirit's branching antlers the first leaves have already opened. And the three nests that brave little birds have built in his antlers, the Wood Spirit has lined with swan down. The tricolour hare who accompanies the Wood Spirit always hops somewhere nearby. They say the long-eared companion with his light leaps wakes the forest dwellers from their winter sleep and checks along the way that they have come through the winter well.

According to ancient legend, the goddess Ostara found a frozen bird and turned it into a hare, and since then he has been the symbol of her festival.

In the last few days Ostara's Breath had been carefully watching the Sun. Yes, quite right. Today the light will equal the darkness and step ahead: Ostara will enter in state the forest that has long awaited her. A joyful time is coming in nature — a time of the triumph of warmth and light. And the Wood Spirit will be the faithful keeper of that joy.