Nature is such a vibrant mirror. In fall, I watch each day as the greens slowly give way to yellows, ochres, browns, russets, and scarlets. In mid-October in the mountains, some trees have shed all their leaves already, while others have barely begun to turn. The trees don’t seem to be holding on…on the contrary, they let go with ease, when they intuitively know it’s time. Each leaf falls when it’s no longer needed and gives itself freely to the great compost of winter. Each tree is willing to stand bare, with its bones exposed, growing energy pulled inward, lying peacefully dormant until spring signals and sunshine beckons new buds.
If I had never seen fall before, I might find this forest-wide dying and dropping off of once-lush foliage to be extremely disturbing. I might think there was a crisis, a disaster, a blight, or an epidemic at hand. I might think the entire forest itself was dying, and I might panic and run for cover. Without the wisdom of a greater understanding, a bigger context in which each season, each cycle, plays its full part in the growth and thriving of all organisms, the unexpected changes of daily life can be scary.
But of course we see fall all the time. We know it’s just one of the seasons of being, a life cycle come back around to this point on the spiral, and we rest in the knowing that spring and summer will bloom soon enough. We welcome fall with festivals and harvests, death rituals and costumes, feasts and family time. We honor fall for what it is and what it hails, and we easily let go of the bounty that summer was, never worrying that we’ll never see that bounty and warmth again. We know better.
But what about the seasons and cycles of our lives that demand shedding, loss, dying, composting, going within and silence? Our creative dry spells, an unexpected change in a significant relationship, a needed recovery from illness, the stages of our lives—child to teen, child-bearing adult to elder—our productivity, our changing emotions? All are natural seasons that turn when they’re ready (whether or not we are), quite beyond our control, and each of these seasons taken in a bigger context can be seen as intrinsic and essential parts of our individual and collective growth as humanity alive on this planet. We are nature, nature is us.
How does this bigger perspective deepen and transform our relationship with the realities of our ever-changing lives?
If we know that each season in our lives plays a valuable part of the whole living organism that we are, that each season is necessary and inevitable and we welcomed each one with an open heart and mind, how would that change the daily experience of the trials of our lives? How would we experience ourselves? Each other? Life itself? Might we recognize a bit more easily the leaves of our own fall seaons and let them go when they’re ready? Might we welcome a cold inner winter wind with the understanding that it’s simply blowing through as a natural part of our soul’s dark season? Might we be able to relax against the chill of that dark morning, and take comfort in remembering that the warmth of springtime will indeed come in its time, and that we can trust that knowing completely?
Certainly we all have the ability to remember that we are always being lovingly guided, every step of the way in life. We might forget, again and again, but sooner or later we DO remember, naturally, and when we do, that is the moment we can say YES again to the fullness of the experience. That’s when we recognize ourselves as in the flow, even though we’ve never actually been out of the flow.
But our awareness of being in the flow is where we feel ourselves in the flow, and that’s where we can rest fully into what’s here right now, and rest in the knowing that all seasons turn in their due time.
