seasons

I know it is a big stretch to say that I experience seasons in Southern California. Here fall means Santa Ana winds and brush fires, while winter means a couple of rain storms if we’re lucky, usually accompanied with mudslides. Spring and summer bring warm and hot temps with some June gloom in between. However, even with my lack of experiencing real seasons, I do feel that my seasonal cycle is a bit out of whack these past two years. Jumping back and forth from Northern to Southern hemispheres (Brasil, Argentina, South Africa) will do that to you, I guess.

All this got me reflecting about seasons and life. Parker Palmer writes a great chapter on the metaphor of seasons in his book, Let Your Life Speak. Palmer prefers the metaphor of seasons of growth, decline, and new life and of comfort and challenge in the cycle of seasons. He shares, “Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or joy, the loss of the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all -- and to find in all of it opportunities of growth.”

On Autumn, Palmer reflects…. “Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer’s abundance decays toward winters’s death. Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? It scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring – and scatters them with amazing abandon….as I explore autumn’s paradox of dying and seeding, I feel the power of metaphor. In the autumnal events of my own experience, I am easily fixated on surface appearances – on decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of work. And yet if I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season to come.”

Now, since it is spring in Argentina (see Adriana Forcatto’s latest blog post: www.adrianainargentina.blogspot.com)....I’ll share some of Palmer’s reflections on spring for my Southern Hemisphere friends in Argentina, Brasil, and South Africa!

“Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me. The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again. The crocuses and snowdrops do not bloom for long. But their mere appearance, however brief, is always a harbinger of hope, and from those small beginnings, hope grows at a geometric rate. The days get longer, the winds get warmer, and the world grows green again. In my own life, as my winters segue into spring, I not only find it hard to cope with mud but hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility: for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.

“From autumn’s profligate seedings to the great spring giveaway, nature teaches a steady lesson: if we want to save our lives, we cannot cling to them but must spend them with abandon.”