These last two weeks it's been had to figure out what season we were in here in upstate New York. We traveled back and forth from summer, to fall, to winter, to a bit of spring, and back to summer again. It felt as if we were reliving the entire year in the space of just a few weeks. The summer heart cooled down to more fall-like temperatures, then did a nosedive with enough frost to coat the cars and endanger any plants that were fooled into thinking it was still summer ... which, a few days later, actually happened when the temperatures climbed into the low 80's. If I was a plant, I'd swear I was experiencing what humans call "seeing my life pass before my eyes."
I've been feeling a lot like that myself lately. With all the changes that have been thrown at us over the last few months, one of the things that has come from having so much time on my hands is the luxury of looking back over the seasons of my life and trying to see what part all of these changes and challenges will play in the story of my life. Before all of this it was easy to see my life in the same way that I see the life of a garden (which, after all, was the whole point of starting this blog in the first place). We prepare the soil, order the seeds we wish to see grow, plant them with care (spring), water and nurture them, feed and water them, learn to be patient as we wait for them to produce (summer), harvest them when they are ready and enjoy the bounty (fall) , and prepare the garden for the long sleep of winter. It's the same with all of the seasons of our lives. Spring is our childhood when everything is new. Summer is when we learn to grow, to become the adults we hope to be. Fall is when we finally harvest the bounty of all we've put into our lives, not only in a material sense, but in the wisdom we've gained as well. Finally, the winter of our lives shows up, usually much faster than we'd imagined, and we settle down to rest, to reflect, and then turn it all over to nature to show us what the next step will be.
It's been very hard to see where all of these crises fit into our lives since they are affecting people who are currently in one season or another. For the youngsters it is scary and they feel lost, groundless. For the adults, they feel helpless to do anything to help themselves and their families. For those of us in what we'd like to call our wisdom years, all we can do is look back at some of the other crises in our lives and remember how we got through those. Natural disasters? Personal disasters? Political and economic disasters? Wars, terror attacks? We've gotten through them all and we're still here. Just as the seasons come, and go, and then come around again, so, too, will this moment, this season in our lives move on. What the next season will look like is anyone's guess, but just like this recent "four seasons in one month" that we experienced up here, we just need to follow the signs and prepare accordingly. For me it's pulling out my sweat pants and sweat shirts, but keeping a few pairs of shorts handy as well. Experience and nature are our best teachers after all.
And so it is.
