Episode 17 | The Loading Bar of Spring: Learning How To Recognize Beginnings That Don’t Look Like Progress Yet

Have you ever watched a loading screen and felt your pulse pick up just a little? The spinning wheel. The buffering bar. That quiet instruction: Please don’t close this window.We’re uncomfortable when we can’t see progress. We want confirmation. A percentage. A sign that the wait means something.Late winter feels like that.This week’s episode explores that gap — the space between what’s happening and what’s visible. The quiet beginnings that don’t announce themselves. The kind of progress that offers no confirmation screen, no percentage bar, no green checkmark.Spring doesn’t arrive all at once.It loads slowly.And so do we.You can’t recognize almost-spring unless you’ve lived the whole way here. Through the dim light, the long nights, the repetition of cold mornings.The accumulated weight of it. The sequence. The repetition.Only then can you recognize what almost-spring really means.Red-winged blackbird recording courtesy of: Stanislas Wroza, XC1021377. Accessible at www.xeno-canto.org/1021377.License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Get full access to Flutter By Meadows at flutterbymeadows.substack.com/subscribe