Winter Cold Moon
Winter is upon us. Beginning to give more thought time to my Living in Season presentation for Groveland on the 27th. The short version is this: learning to adapt your life to the season, rather than the seasons to your life. I mean this on at least two levels: the literal and the metaphorical.
(A seasonal round. This is a new idea to me, but I like it a lot.)
The literal can include such things as caring for plants outside during the growing season. Maybe in a container, a window box. Maybe in a flower bed or a vegetable garden. Could be an orchard or a woods. Maybe a community garden. Something to synch up at least part of your daily life with the emergence of plants from winter’s fallow time.
It can also include intentionally leaving time in your winter schedule for retreats, inside projects like crafts or writing or visiting friends.
Perhaps in all the seasons hiking might be part of your plan, a liturgical response similar in all seasons but changed by them in profound ways. If you can’t hike, get someone to help you be outside some amount of time each week. Yes, even in the dreaded middle weeks of January.
Metaphorical: first, know which season of your life you are in. Are you college age, in the still vigorous growth years? Or, are you in the mature years, the years of the late growing season, the early harvest days? Or, like me, are you in the days of the late harvest, headed toward the long, eternal fallow time?
Here, too, we can find analogical help from living in season. When sun and rain and warm temperatures push a plant up, up, up, perhaps that time right around flowering, then it must attend as well to its roots, not forgetting the stabilizing and nutrient gathering powers of those underneath surface parts. So, for example, when college and the world of work begins to beckon, as graduation nears and your own unique bloom begins to present itself to the universe at large, this may be a time to recall hometown, old friends, family. Favorite hobbies and pets and places. It may seem that these people and places hold you back, hold you down, are heavy anchors weighted to yesterday. But, no. Instead these are the anchors in the deep subsoil of your life that hold you up, feed those parts of you that remember the child you once were, remind you of the long strengths that balance the new, shiny ones obtained through education.
Anyhow, stuff like that. More by the 27th.
