Seasons
How we work with them rather than against them. How they are already working within us, despite our work against them.
In April, I wrote a poem about how I’ve noticed that over my life, I tend to have significant personal and spiritual sprouting during the spring season months. Now, in the late Fall, as we are deep in the days of limited sunlit hours, I’m making connections and noticing how much my spiritual life mimics the ways that Earth moves throughout her seasons of change; releasing, nourishing, tending, harvesting, clearing, stocking, saving, pausing, resting, creating. Here is what I’m gathering — I’ll start with the Spring, since that’s when we awake from the dark and cold months in a few months from now.
Spring
In springtime, the planted seeds begin to sprout. The days are longer, the sun is getting closer and warmer. The ice melts off the windows and the rain water begins to evaporate off the pavement faster. The outside air feels like life; with birds calling to each other from the trees that sit in the oxygen-rich scent of fertile, fresh dirt. Flowers are blooming in the trees on my walk to work, and I feel a budding bloom happening somewhere inside of me. The daylight hours are stretching, and my spirit’s muscles are ready to step outside to do the same — they’re aching for movement after the winter months’ long period of rest.
Any new years resolutions that I placed to be baked in the oven over the winter, the bake that has been permeating the household with its aroma, is ready to be pulled out.
Summer
In the summertime, life is big, open, full of opportunity. The Earth is basking in its glory with the Sun, and we are basking in their partnership that delivers to us our much-anticipated long, bright days. There is excitement in the branches of the trees whose leaves have been freshly plumped. There is commotion in the campgrounds and river spots. There is energy, communication, movement. Ceremony, concert tours, vacations.
Late Summer and early Fall is when we see eruptions of wildfires in California, and it’s when I feel bursts of heat and combustion myself. Days and weeks that are so full of simply trying to contain a fire, with hope that not too long will pass in between the fire’s ignition and its extinguishing. Yet these fires are necessary as a part of clearing the way to prepare for new. Controlled burns show us how we use the element of fire to tend to the Earth, using ignition to prevent unnecessary future destruction.
Fall
In Fall, we begin to slow down from the commotion of summer, yet simultaneously hunker down for the focus and oncoming work of harvest. The leaves of the trees are changing colors and detaching from their branches they spent all summer getting to know. Kids return to school with so much from the summer to fill their friends in on, so much that happened that made them into a whole different person than the one who left just a few months earlier.
I begin to parse through all the Summer’s material and assess it for the weight it holds. I collect what’s ready to be harvested; sweet apples, crunchy corn, freshly revised lessons of the ongoing coursework of my life — much like the freshly revised lessons of the kids returning to school at the same time. I take these lessons and these apples and then God and I contemplate on how we’ll spend the coming months with them; baking, simmering, chopping… composting? We gather the material, the notes from our lessons of the longer days of summer and lay them out on the feasting table. We survey the contents, take stock of what we have and discuss what we could make with it. We identify the ingredients that are missing that we’ll need to obtain to fulfill the recipes our harvest has inspired us to make. We prepare for the coming months. We boil and simmer, chop and mix and assemble, freeze and thaw. We share with our loved ones.
We consider where our joy and fulfillment came from over the Spring and Summer. We think of where we want to spend our time over the holidays. We look at what we did this year out of obligation, what left us feeling depleted, who we made meaningful memories and connections with, where we found hope. We assess our tasks and projects, what we did and didn’t get to over the summer, and decide what’s worth continuing to pursue and what we’d rather just scrap. We hone into our relationships, our habits, check in on our goals and our fears, ask ourselves: am I happy with where I’m at right now?
Winter
In the winter, what we have harvested and planted in the soil will carry us through the coming months. We celebrate the shortest day of the year through warmth, fire, loved ones, sources of comfort, and hopefully rest. Hopefully we get to walk into the depths of Winter in restful reflection of the latest cycle of seasons, and we are not too overburdened by the obligations, the consumerism, the survival under capitalism. Hopefully we get to bask in our success of survival up until this point, as we’ve gathered and prepared our spiritual feasts. We deserve to be able to enjoy, in celebration, the fact that our physical bodies have made it through another cycle of seasons, and thus getting to look forward to emerging in the spring with the sun, the birds, the trees, the blooming flowers.
Many of us make resolutions in the Gregorian calendar’s switch into the new year. As we sip on cups of hot tea of pine and cinnamon and maple syrup, we use the reflections we’ve made in the latest cycle of seasons to help us compile lists of what’s to be put in the compost bin and returned to the Earth, and lists of what we’d like to put into the oven to rise and bake — the bake that inadvertently warms the household as the oven whirs its energy into our intentions.
What is the fragrance I want this bake to carry through my place of rest, as we huddle inside as the cold rain quenches and clenches the dirt of the Earth outside? Is it bubbling and browning in a savory sauce? Is it sweet? Is it full of spices? Is it to be devoured immediately after removal from the oven, or will it need to cool and rest on the counter for a while? Does it remind me of childhood, something familiar and comforting? Or is it new, is it adventurous? Is it something I’ve never assembled and baked before, am I nervous of how it may come out, of how brave will I really be to feed it to myself in the Spring?
Is it making me more and more hungry the longer I’m waiting for the timer to go off? That is the hope. That the lessons I pull ingredients from and assemble into meals increase my appetite to keep going, to live this life, to seek my ambitions, to continue meeting my authentic self.