Four Seasons

What do you love about where you live?

Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn. I love the feel of experiencing all four seasons as each of them has a beauty and allure all its own.

As I am writing, I find myself in the Northern Hemisphere in summer. Culturally, summer has become a time of vacations and heat and the beach for many folks I know. I always find it intriguing that the same folks who disdain the heat will in just six short months be disdaining the cold of winter. I admit, sometimes the heat seems to press down, stealing the breath and involuntarily slowing my pace especially when coupled with high humidity. Still, the heat offers a promise of outdoor gatherings and playing children and birds singing loudly. Summer invites me to ask if I can receive the heat as a gift with the fullness of life and take breaks in rush, to find a slower pace in moments when the heat is “heaviest?”

When autumn approaches it brings with it a full array of nature’s colors displayed in leaves which give up their matching green attire for a cacophony of hues. The last of the harvest happens here in the beginning of autumn as the warmer evening air gives way to a cool, crisp feel. The changing leaves also begin to fall from the trees. It has always seemed to me that the trees let go the leaves much more easily than I let go of anything; yet perhaps I simply don’t know how the trees experience their loss of foliage. Autumn invites me to ask what I might need to let go and can I appreciate rich diversity as well as imagined uniformity?

Winter takes me inside and adds layers to my daily attire. Winter is a season of cold, sometimes bitterly cold, days and a fallow-ness, a resting in nature. The landscape is a bit more barren. Leafless, stick-figure trees interspersed with a few evergreens are the landscape of winter locally. Winter is a season all its own but I also find it seems to invite an anticipation of spring. I want to rush ahead out of the cold, barrenness of winter to the new life of spring. Winter invites me to practice being present even in the cold and seeming empty spaces of my life, not to run away.

Spring brings us full circle to new beginnings and new life springing forth. Seeds are planted and trees begin their budding. Birdsong returns more robustly to the morning sounds filling my waking world. And waking seems a good word to describe spring for it seems the world is doing just that: awakening from a long slumber. Spring invites me to ask what is springing anew to life in me and to what might be birthing into my life?

I am thankful for all four seasons and what each brings. I am thankful that each brings its questions and pleasures and challenges. I am thankful as well that all fours are part of a cycle of oneness; each season yields itself to the next and makes a wholeness.