Live the Seasons

Mar 14, 2023

Hello family! Here I am hitting send again on a newsletter. Commitment from the last one, accomplished. No commitment to this level of regularity, but grateful to be writing and sharing it with you. Hope you enjoy and be well.

Boston winters are painted in a stripped down pallet. The whole world gets dominated by grays and tawdry browns air sprayed with salted haze.

I live in a neighborhood of Victorian homes detailed in every vibrant color combination you can think of, and even they look like someone flipped on an Instagram “cool” filter this time of year.

Image 1: A little ways up our street. Image 2: Jamaica Pond in our neighborhood of Jamaica Plain.

Three years ago this week—before March1 could tip over the equinox to offer her blooms of hope; as my wife, Libbey, struggled at the mid-point of a debilitating pregnancy; three months after we moved here, still stripped of community; unemployed and struggling to discern how and into what arena to reboot my career in a new city where I was an unknown; just around the time I started getting proper depressed about the gestalt of the whole situation—the pandemic exploded into our lives.

Late winter 2020 was a low. Perhaps you remember?

We were renting an apartment on the third level of a triple decker with limited windows and no view to speak of. Locked in our home, afraid even to touch the common doorknobs down the shared stairwells lest we endanger the unborn baby or anyone else, I starved, as we all did, for beauty, for connection, desperate for any hint of life.

Behind our building, circling the dirt lot where my neighbors and I parked our cars, a thick ring of trees rose another 30 feet above our third floor wooden balcony. I would wrap myself three layers deep, sit on that balcony, and stare at those trees. Valiant Googling not withstanding, I couldn’t tell you what they were. Growing up we called brittle trees growing unbidden along fence lines “trash trees.” These were nothing of the sort. Some species of maple is my best guess, but I remember when they first pressed burgundy bud-lets through the tip of every twig. I remember when those buds spilled outward, unfurling beaded tassels that flittered with the breeze. I remember how the days dragged as I waited, willing them toward leafing into the dappled shades of emerald, and the warmth that would accompany it, for which my quarantined body longed.

In the years since, I have watched the seasons. I study the ground. I note when the magnolias first fruit their fuzzy buds and how long they hold their blooms of pink and white in inner secret.

I know that in the first week of March, six blocks from here on the aptly named Spring Park Road, there is a forsythia who wreathes herself in golden flame weeks before her kin. She is a beacon in the dark.

I know that by now the snow drops seeded generations ago in the bed in front of my house will begin to press their way through freeze-hardened soil to share their impossibly delicate, ballet slipper-blue petals with all who pass their way.

I know that by the start of April they will be encircled by crocus and joined by dozens more of their kind.

Spring catches my breath in my chest. It’s easy to be compassionately present to cliché levels of beauty (see: entertainment industry). But I still have a long way to go in becoming present to these grayer, shadowed winter days and the ways they too can minister.

The world has been too much with us, beloveds. I see your grief. My heart feels the weight of all you have been struggling against, all this tilted world keeps raking your direction.

I remember the early days of the pandemic as a time of fear, grief, uncertainty, and wild inequities. I remember it too as a space of blessed quiet, when leaves and flowers and beavers kept up the work of creation and invited us back into their sacred rhythm.

For everything else that can and should and has been said about that time, what it meant and what it means for us today, it was a season which at least extended the option of redirecting our attention toward things holy and healing. In that redirected attention, we had an opportunity to remember our kinship to one another and to everything else that lives in the soil and water and sunlight as we do. We had a chance to consider where and when we are. And in making space for such closely considered attention, room was created within which we could love.2

Consider the birds of the air.

As the turning seasons keep pulling us forward into this new abnormal normal, it’s become harder to attend to what matters in creation, in ourselves, in our communities and world, and the movements of the Spirit blowing through it all.

To riff on Rilke, the point is the live the seasons. How?

I’d like to offer a couple contemplative practices for cultivating attention to what’s swirling in and around us that help me live the seasons.

Start a Season Journal

Do you know which flowers will bloom this month? What birds are with you today? Does moss grow on the north side of trees in your neighborhood (Robin Wall Kimmerer says this is the quickest way to assess your air quality)? Where do the squirrels go? What food is fresh today from your planting zone?

Write something down you notice in nature each day. Be curious. It could be as small as that first blade of grass that curls out of its winter dormancy or as big as the Nor’easter blowing through Boston right on schedule today.

You can write out as much as you want or keep a one sentence journal in the spirit of

An Irritable Métis

It could be a photo journal (part of my practice, as you can see). Create an album on your phone called your Season Journal and look back year after year to see how similar the look and timing of plants are. Make it a “shared album” and it becomes a communal contemplative practice.

Attempting to sketch what you see, no matter how poor the attempts, focuses your mind and body on the intimate details.

Gradually, as you continue the practice, allow your attention to settle below the level of fact finding. The real challenge, particularly if you were raised to be white or deep in Western materialist culture, is to use the practice to develop attention that goes beyond objectification into one of reciprocity between beings-in-community. That’s the road down which care and collective well being lie—a site we call communion in my tradition.

Reflection Prompt: What season of life are you in?

[All credit for this goes to the Ayni Institute. They are quickly becoming my favorite training center for their deep insights in movement theory, shaped by the profound experience of their team and drawing on indigenous knowledges. I attended their free training on this topic in the fall and highly recommend it.]

What season of life are you in personally? Are you in a season of exploration (healthy spring)? Deconstruction (healthy fall or unhealthy winter)? Flow and productivity (healthy or overheated summer)? Burnout (unhealthy winter)? Rest (healthy winter)?

Just as there is no bad season in nature, there is no “bad” season of life. There are times when a warm wind is blowing and we find ourselves capable of incredible feats. There are others when we need to just drop our leaves and lay fallow for awhile. There are times when emergence is everywhere but the shape of what is to come hasn’t yet come to maturity. And there are times to harvest, get cozy, and enjoy the fruits of our labor.

What’s crucial is coming to awareness of where you are in this season of life, living fully into what it has to offer, and what it asks of you. There is gift and in the gift there is responsibility. This is how we as creatures were created to function. Just like everything else on God’s good earth.

Take a little time to journal around these questions: How would you describe this season? What season might you be coming out of or into? Do you feel in rhythm or out of sync with the season of the land right now?

Ayni applies this training to community organizers and says the second question is: what season is your organization/movement in? Being in or out of sync with your workplace has an enormous effect on wellbeing, and often flies by unacknowledged. We could expand this to include family or whatever collectives most shape the conditions of your life, activities, and emotional world. What season of life are your closest people in? How is that producing synergy or friction between you? It’s worth expanding the survey still, asking what season our culture, politics, and nation is in today and how that is interacted with our internal weather patterns. Lord knows the state of the world has battered many of us over the past few years, creating the conditions for our sunny days and storms.

Out of this matrix of seasons—bioregional, spiritual, life cycle, organizational, communal, historical—vocation emerges. Quaker educator Parker Palmer is worth sitting with as we meditate on these questions and the rhythms of our lives:3

The seasonal metaphor…takes the quest for selfhood and vocation out beyond its origins in the depths of the inner life, out beyond the human community and its call to leadership, into the world of nature, that most vast of all the visible worlds in which our lives are embedded.

If we accept the notion that our lives are dependent on an inexorable cycle of seasons, on a play of powers that we can conspire with but never control, we run headlong into a culture that insists, against all evidence, that we can make whatever kind of life we want, whenever we want it. Deeper still, we run headlong into our own egos, which want desperately to believe that we are always in charge.
We need to challenge and reform these distortions of culture and ego—reform them toward ways of thinking and doing and being that are rooted in respect for the living ecology of life. Unlike ‘raw material’ on which we make all the demands, this ecology makes demands on us even as it sustains our lives. We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed.

Yes.

In those early, lonely pandemic months, I moved slowly through Thomas Merton’s book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. His conflicted gaze out into the troubled social scene of the 1960s from a monastic hermitage in the Kentucky woods reflected my own guilty conscience as we waited out the months until our daughter would be born while the world roiled.

Early one spring morning, as Merton listened to the land wake and meditated on her meanings, he wrote the following:4

How the valley awakes. At two-fifteen in the morning there are no sounds except in the monastery: the bells ring, the office begins. Outside, nothing, except perhaps a bullfrog saying “Om” in the creek or in the guesthouse pond…The mysterious and uninterrupted whooping of the whippoorwill begins about three, these mornings. He is not always near. Sometimes there are two whooping together, perhaps a mile away in the woods in the east.
The first chirps of the waking day birds marks the ‘point vierge’ of the dawn under a sky as yet without real light, a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence, when the Father in perfect silence opens their eyes.
All wisdom seeks to collect and manifest itself at that blind sweet spot. Man’s wisdom does not succeed, for we are fallen into self-mastery and cannot ask permission of anyone. We face our mornings as men of undaunted purpose. We know the time and we dictate terms. We are in a position to dictate terms, we suppose: we have a clock that proves we are right from the very start. We know what time it is…We will say in advance what kind of day it has to be. Then if necessary we will take steps to make it meet our requirements.
For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the virgin point between darkness and light, between nonbeing and being. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs. Worse folly still if you think they are telling you something you might consider useful—that it is, for example, four o’clock.
So they wake: first the catbirds and cardinals and some that I do not know. Later the song sparrows and wrens. Last of all the doves and crows.
Here is an unspeakable secrete: paradise is all around us and we do not understand.