The Hares Are Running Again

The hares are back out in the fields again.

Not that they ever fully disappear, but at this time of year they become visible in a different way. Less hidden in the long grass and winter hedgerows, more willing to break cover and run the tracks between the fields and woodland edges. Early morning or late evening, if you stand quietly enough, you’ll catch them suddenly in motion—lean muscle and instinct, hurtling low across the ground as though something ancient has remembered itself inside them.

There’s something about hares that never feels entirely tame.

Even when they pause, they don’t fully settle. Their bodies seem built for alertness, ears twitching towards sounds you haven’t yet noticed, eyes wide to movement at the edge of the landscape. They carry a kind of readiness that feels deeply familiar to many human nervous systems. Especially the tired ones. Especially the ones that have spent a long time surviving.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

About how many people arrive in therapy exhausted, but still running internally. Bodies slowed down by burnout, anxiety, grief or overwhelm, while the mind continues scanning the horizon for danger. Resting physically but never truly landing. Sitting on the sofa while the nervous system remains halfway out in the field, alert for what might come next.

For some people, slowing down doesn’t feel peaceful. It feels exposed. The world talks a lot about rest as though it’s simple. Take a break. Switch off. Slow down. But if your nervous system has learned that safety depends on vigilance, rest can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. Sometimes even frightening. Stillness creates enough quiet for everything that’s been held back to start catching up. And so people keep moving.

Not always visibly. Sometimes the movement is internal. Overthinking. Planning. Doom-scrolling. Staying busy enough not to fully feel what’s underneath. ADHD minds especially often carry this tension, a constant pull between exhaustion and stimulation, depletion and restlessness. The body pleading for pause while the brain keeps sprinting laps around the field.

The hares made me think about that strange place between survival and emergence. Because right now, the woodland feels like it’s waking properly. The edges are softening into summer. The tracks through the fields are alive with movement again. Tawny owls pass overhead in the evenings, low and silent between the trees, while barn owls drift across the fields like scraps of pale smoke in the last of the light. Everything feels busy with life returning. And yet nature never rushes it.

The hares don’t emerge because someone tells them they should be doing better by now.

They move when the conditions are right.

There’s wisdom in that which feels increasingly absent from human life.

We live in a culture obsessed with productivity, recovery stories, transformations, getting back to normal as quickly as possible. Even healing can become something performative if we’re not careful. A pressure to prove we’re coping well enough, fast enough, positively enough.

But real recovery is rarely dramatic.

Most of the time it looks much quieter than that.

• A person answering a message they’ve been avoiding for weeks.

• Cooking a proper meal after living on toast and caffeine.

• Opening the curtains.

• Walking outside without headphones.

• Laughing unexpectedly at something small.

• Tiny movements back towards life.

That’s what the hares reminded me of this week. Not dramatic reinvention. Just cautious emergence. A nervous system slowly deciding that maybe, just maybe, it’s safe enough to step out from cover for a while.

Not forever.

Just long enough to feel the evening air again.

There’s something deeply hopeful about that.

Not the loud, shiny kind of hope that demands certainty. The softer kind. The kind rooted in noticing that life keeps returning in small ways, even after hard seasons. Even after long winters internally or otherwise.

The hares are running again.

And maybe some part of us is too.

From the Forest Edge

If you’re tired in a way that rest alone doesn’t seem to fix, you’re not failing.

Some nervous systems learn to survive by staying alert for a very long time.

Healing often begins quietly—not with a dramatic breakthrough, but with the smallest flicker of safety returning to the body.

Sometimes that’s enough for now.