Letting the Season Teach Us

Several blogs ago, I wrote about my affinity for Staying Healthy With the Seasons. I found the book decades ago in a little bookstore in San Luis Obispo, California, and it immediately resonated with me. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that nature holds incredible wisdom. If we would simply study it, follow it, and allow it to guide us, perhaps we would live better, feel better, be better.

A human Being rather than a human Doing.

For most of human history, light and season shaped everyday life. We rose with daylight. Ate what grew nearby. Worked differently in summer than winter. Gathered when food was plentiful. Rested when darkness came early.

Modern life has given us extraordinary freedom from those constraints. We can make January feel like July. Turn midnight into afternoon. Eat strawberries in December. Keep producing through every season of our lives.

But our bodies still remember the sun. And somewhere along the way, freedom from the seasons became an expectation that we should no longer have seasons at all.

We expect ourselves to be consistently productive, motivated, social, creative, energetic. When something that worked beautifully three months ago no longer fits, we wonder what has gone wrong.

Nature would find this idea rather strange.

An apple tree does not produce apples in February and wonder why it has lost its edge. A field does not apologize for lying fallow. The garden does not consider winter a failure of productivity.

Everything living has rhythms of expansion and contraction.

Including us.

Listening Instead of Controlling

Our bodies have never entirely forgotten this. Circadian rhythms respond to light and darkness. Sleep is influenced by environmental cues. Time outdoors is associated with psychological well-being. 

Seasonal living doesn't need to become another wellness program. 

It can simply be a relationship.

Instead of always asking, How can I make today conform to my plans? we can occasionally ask: What is today asking of me?

August might say: savor.

January might say: rest.

March might whisper: begin.

October might say: release.

Our lives have seasons too. There are times for building and times for tending. Times for company and times for solitude. Times when we know exactly where we're going and times when we don't.

Maybe wisdom is recognizing when something has completed its work.

Not adding.

Releasing.

Practice: Ask the Season

Go outside somewhere quiet.

Notice the light. Temperature. Plants. Birds. Insects. Wind. Notice what is flourishing and what is fading.

Then ask yourself:

What is happening in nature around me?

Where is that same movement happening in my life?

What would it look like to cooperate with it rather than resist it?

Write whatever comes.

Or don't.

No revelation required. No five-year plan required.

Just listen.

Carry On

The Wheel turns without our assistance.

Summer does not need our permission to become autumn. Leaves do not create strategic plans for falling. Darkness does not apologize for arriving earlier.

The world knows how to change.

Perhaps our work is not always to decide what comes next. Some habits belonged to an earlier season. Some ambitions did too. Some versions of ourselves helped us become who we are and can now be thanked and set down. And some things are only beginning to stir beneath the surface, not yet ready to be named.

Nature rarely reveals the whole story at once.

First the light changes. Then the air. Then one leaf turns at the top of a tree. The rest comes when it comes. 

Maybe that's enough for now.

The Wheel is already turning.

We can follow.