Aprilis: The Month That Dares to Begin Again
April has always been the month that believed in us before we believed in ourselves.
The ancient Romans called it Aprilis, and scholars have long debated its root — some say it comes from aperire, Latin for “to open.” And yes. Yes. That is exactly right. April is the month of opening. Not the grand, theatrical opening of something new and shiny, but the quiet, almost stubborn cracking open of something that has been waiting underground, in the cold and dark, trusting that the warmth would return.
I’ve lived that story. Many of us have.
There is a figure I have come to love deeply in my later years — Kokopelli, the hunchbacked flute player of the Southwest and Hopi peoples. He walks with a curved spine, a pack on his back, and a song pouring from his lips wherever he goes. He is the bringer of warmth, of spring, of good fortune. He presides over birth — both the birth of children and the birth of the harvest from the earth. He is not a warrior, not a king. He is a wanderer who plays music. And wherever his song reaches, things grow.
I think about Kokopelli when I think about what it meant to be a young gay man in decades when spring felt very far away. We carried things on our backs too — silence, secrets, grief we had no language for yet. And still, some of us played our songs. Quietly at first. Then louder. We were, without knowing it, doing what April does: insisting on life.
April sits at the hinge of the year, at that tender turning point between the long exhale of winter and the full-throated joy of summer. In so many spiritual traditions across this wide, beautiful world, this season is marked as sacred precisely because it is the moment when the earth herself chooses renewal. She doesn’t ask permission. She simply begins.
That is the invitation April extends to each of us.
In modern spiritual practice — whether you walk a Pagan path, follow an Earth-based tradition, or simply feel moved by the undeniable holiness of a tree deciding to bloom — April calls us to honor what is being reborn. Not just outside, in the soil and the rivers and the birds returning home, but inside. In us. April asks: what in you has been waiting through the cold? What seed have you been holding, quietly, faithfully, in the dark?
As an elder, I will tell you this plainly: it is never too late for your April. I have seen people bloom in their sixties, their seventies, their eighties — burst open into something they never let themselves become when they were young and afraid. The earth does not keep track of how many winters you’ve endured. She only knows that spring is here, and that is reason enough to rise.
So let Kokopelli’s flute find you this month. Let it reach that quiet, curled-up place in you that has been waiting. Let April do what April does.
Open. Grow. Begin.
