The Four Seasons of Life

We enjoy the cycles of the seasons in our lives. For me, fall brings remembrances of back to school, liver biopsies, cancer treatment, and finding my organ donor. This year, I’m watching the deer feed, waiting for the leaves to turn, and planning a trip with my daughter.

Now that the Autumn Equinox has passed, the nights become longer than the days, and a new season has begun. I feel it in my heart as well as my body. As a teacher, fall is a celebration of many things. Since I’m not in the classroom, please let me reminisce with you and discover all the ways that our life also moves with the four seasons.

Seasons of Life

Spring signifies new beginnings and is always alive because it’s a time of planting. Turning over a spade of soil to begin the sowing is a favorite pastime, helping us connect with the earth. The rainy months shower us with water, bringing seeds to life. So, in the springtime, we embark with joy, enthusiasm, and extreme growth.

We are finding a new way to be in the world, and like the birds, we build new nests. Indeed, springtime is a symbolic of newly created lives and fresh starts.

Summer is lived at it’s fullest. Bright, hot, and radiant, we move into action. We expand into the world, and begin to grow our career, family life, relationships, and adventures. It’s a progressive time, filled with energy and the desire to achieve.

During this season, even fruits and vegetables produce abundant growth. There is a bustle of pulling the weeds and picking the crops. In the summer of adult lives we prune, making way for intense growth, insuring that we will be ready for autumn.

Settling Down Seasons

Autumn is a season of life when the days become shorter, as we enter a time of clarity. If we didn’t do so before, now a definite move towards introspection begins. It’s a time of learning. Even as children, we slowed our pace, and became students, lining our inner lives with rich new ideas. There is also celebrating and harvesting. Fall offers many lavish crops of grapes, squash, apples, and pumpkins.

Without the long days of white hot sun, the sky becomes a brighter shade of blue. Nature prepares for winter, and so do we. It’s a time to work and become creative. Fall represents a working phase of life where we store up riches in preparation for rest.

Winter sneaks up slowly after nature has dropped her leaves. All of a sudden, the stark black branches are set amongst a grey backdrop of sky. A silence settles over the earth, and nature restores herself by taking a long nap. In the winter season of life, it’s as though all of our hard work has prepared us for this time of introspection, interwoven with wisdom.

Shrouded in mystery, in winter everything is understated, in repose, and at rest. Beneath the surface, nature is still wild with life. It’s simply a more subdued season, one that is perfect for reflecting in stillness and reflection.

The Gift of Seasons

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Ecc. 3:1

Yesterday morning my granddaughter and I walked together before school on the autumn equinox.  We both felt the change. Every season is beautiful, but in the big picture, I’m looking forward to the winter of life because it was almost stolen from me. I thought death would come during summer. Instead, I’m in the fall of my life literally and figuratively. I have to wonder: what season of life are you in right now?