March

March is the hungry month.

Not the cute, sourdough-starter, cozy-soup kind of hungry. The old kind. The agrarian kind. The kind where the root cellar is starting to look echoey and the jars on the pantry shelf feel spaced a little farther apart than they did in November.

If you grew all your calories yourself, this would be the stretch.

The potatoes are sprouting soft white tentacles.
The squash are down to the last few good ones.
The canned tomatoes are getting rationed more thoughtfully.
The freezer has that hollow sound when you move things around.

It is not spring.
It is not winter.
It is the thin place in between.

I always feel it.

Even now, when the grocery store is ten minutes away and strawberries exist in plastic coffins year round, something in my body registers the scarcity. The light is technically coming back, but it is gray and indirect and not yet warm. The snow is ugly. The ground is mud. Nothing is growing. Everything is waiting.

March is the hungry month.

And I think the hunger is not just for food.

This morning I woke up with that strange hollow feeling I sometimes get after too much screen time or too many metrics or too much… whatever this is. That moment when you look at something you have been very invested in and suddenly your brain detaches and goes:

This is actually all pixels.
This is literally all made up.

Do you ever get that playing video games? You’re deep in it, fully immersed, heart rate up, strategy engaged. Then you zoom out for a second and you see the edges of it. You see the rendering. You see the seams. You remember you are sitting in a chair pressing buttons and none of it is materially real.

This morning I had that feeling about… everything.

Like, oh.
This is all fake.
We are all just participating in agreed upon structures.
Money is numbers on a screen.
The internet is light pulses.
The outrage cycle is an algorithm.
The urgency is manufactured.

It was not even sad exactly.
Just disorienting.

There is something about being in between seasons that makes the scaffolding visible. In high summer, life feels thick and embodied. There are tomatoes to pick and ducks to herd and dirt under your nails. In deep winter, at least the cold is honest. It demands something from you.

March is fluorescent grocery store lighting.

It is the month where the stored energy runs low and the new growth has not yet arrived. It is the place where you can see how much of modern life is abstraction.

Seasonal depression is not dramatic for me. It is not cinematic. It is flat. It is a slight loss of color saturation. Food tastes fine but not exciting. Projects feel important and then suddenly arbitrary. The big dreams wobble.

I think this event is giving me a weird existential crisis.

Not because the event itself is bad. Not because anything is wrong. But because when you are tracking numbers, stars, views, output, progress, there is always a risk that you wake up one morning and your brain says:

You know this is all just a game, right?

And it is.
And it is not.

The crops are real.
The debt is real.
The meals are real.
The people are real.

But the structures around them are sometimes… pixelated.

March strips things down. It asks: what is actually feeding you?

Not dopamine.
Not metrics.
Not hypothetical future versions of yourself.

What is feeding you right now?

For me, the answer is embarrassingly analog.

Opening the windows for the first real airing out of the year and letting the cold air shove the stale winter out.
Starting seeds in trays that look like nothing for weeks and then suddenly sprout.
Eating the last good squash and being grateful it stored at all.

March is the hungry month.

But hunger is information.

It tells you where the gaps are.
It tells you what you have been running on.
It tells you what you actually need.

Some of the hunger is sunlight.
Some of it is fresh greens.
Some of it is community that exists off screen.
Some of it is meaning that is not gamified.

Okay.
If this layer is abstraction, what is underneath it?

Underneath it is breath.
Underneath it is a body that needs food and sleep.
Underneath it is a house that needs cleaning and smoke alarms installed and windows opened.
Underneath it is land that will, very soon, start growing again whether I am existential about it or not.

March is uncomfortable.

But it is also honest.

It shows you the pantry at its lowest point.
It shows you your motivation at its lowest point.
It shows you the places where you were running on stored surplus.

And then, quietly, it will begin again (hopefully).

The first green tips.
The smell of fresh spring rain and thawing earth.

The hunger will pass.

But it is worth listening to while it is here.

These potatoes feel like I do