Fall is here, hard as it is to believe that today, with the temperature hitting a high of 97. It may feel summer-hot, but we've made the turn into fall. Everything seems to be going to seed, or doing its best to soak up all the sunlight in can. Autumn is in the air -- and so are the geese. And harvestman and daddy longlegs are both delightful names for the same creature, which is not actually a spider, despite appearances.
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The spring equinox, so today we are standing on the threshold between fall/winter and spring/summer -- and today was a day that held glimpses of both. As I walked across campus this morning, I heard the soft cooing of a mourning dove, a forerunner of the summer days ahead. The sun slid between puffy clouds of gray, sending a welcome shaft of sunlight across the bare trees ahead of me -- and when I looked towards the east, I discovered a gauzy veil of dancing snowflakes. They were hardly visible when I looked west, except for an occasional large flake that caught the light. And then there was the windchill that took the temperature down into the teens. Huddled in my winter coat and scarf, I felt a kinship with these early purple crocuses, and their decision to stay furled this morning. In a south facing bed, the yellow and white crocus were cautious, but started to loosen up as the sun touched them, and later brought a welcome touch of golden light. The photo of the snowdrops is from a warmer day last week. I took it just in time -- they are pretty much done now. I wanted to commemorate my delight in their nearly two months of blooming, hidden again and again under snow and yet still standing. There's also a touch of summer in this photo. A bee scrambled headfirst into one of the blossoms and if you look closely, you may be able to spot where it's hiding.
The view from our front steps is a prosaic one most of the time -- houses, trees, telephone poles, college buildings, a busy street or traffic backed up waiting for a train. The sky is still there though, and in recent days, the transition times have been full of color. This morning it was lavender and pink, turning the whole sky rosy. As I walked over to campus to meet my sister for our morning walk, the refrain from Fiddler on the Roof kept running through my head, quite in keeping with the seasonal metaphor I've been exploring the last while.
Sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, swiftly fly the years, One season following another, laden with happiness and tears. And with light and shadow, dark and light. And color. Palmer's seasonal metaphor for the inner journey flows from the new beginnings of scattered fall seeds, to winter dormancy, to the spring flowering of paradox, and so comes to summer's abundance.
Summer is the season of abundance and first harvest. Having traced the seed of true self on its arduous journey from birth, through death and dormancy, into flowering, we can look at the abundance that has grown up within us and ask, “Whom is this meant to feed? Where am I called to give my gifts?” A Hidden Wholeness, p 83 Palmer cautions that the idealists among us ask these questions prematurely -- wanting to serve the world's needs, but burning out trying to do more than we are able. We need first to understand our true self -- the seeds planted in us, the deaths and dormancy, the new life, the fruit. To understand the true self, we need the interior intimacy that comes with solitude and we need the giving and taking, the listening and speaking, the being and doing that comes with community. I cannot give what I do not possess, so I need to know what gifts have grown up within me that are now ready to be harvested and shared. If the gifts I give are mine, grown from the seed of true self, I can give them without burning out. Like the fruit of a tree, they will replenish themselves in due season. A Hidden Wholeness, p 83 Abundance and harvest -- and then again the scattering of seeds, times of dormancy and paradox, and new growth. The seasons cycle, again and again. In his Circles of Trust, Palmer works with this seasonal metaphor representing a lifetime; his writing reveals the cycles of seasons occurring again and again in his own life. I shared this seasonal metaphor with a group of friends recently, and one exclaimed, with a sudden shock of recognition, "I'm out of season!" In her current seasonal cycle, she had assumed she was moving into a summertime of abundance and harvest, and instead found herself in an unexpected wintry dormancy, with glimmers of spring paradox. Outside my window, northern Indiana is moving into winter dormancy. In my interior world, I am living into a variety of spring paradoxes. What season are you in? Palmer continues his seasonal metaphor for the inner journey by turning from winter's dormancy to the paradoxes of spring. Spring is the season of surprise when we realize once again that despite our perennial doubts, winter’s darkness yields to light and winter’s deaths give rise to new life. So one metaphor for spring is “the flowering of paradox.” As spring’s wonders arise from winter’s hardships, we are invited to reflect on the many “both-ands” we must hold to live fully and well – and to become more confident that as creatures embedded in nature, we know in our bones how to hold them. The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring; these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love. But in the spring we are reminded that human nature, like nature herself, can hold opposites together as paradoxes, resulting in a more capacious and generous life. A Hidden Wholeness, p 82 - 3 Above, a dead and decaying log -- filled with moss, lichen and tiny mushrooms. The close-up is below.
One seasonal metaphor for our life's journey begins with a childhood springtime, blossoms into youthful summer, transitions into a midlife autumnal harvest, and slowly fades into the wintry chill of old age.A lot of us find the journey more complicated than that, and that's another reason Parker Palmer's seasonal metaphor in A Hidden Wholeness caught my eye. He begins the cycle with fall as a time of new beginnings and the scattering of seeds -- very appropriate for someone working with educators! But then comes winter. The seeds of possibility planted with such hope in the fall must eventually endure winter, when the potentials we carried at birth appear to be dead and gone. As we look out upon the winter landscape of our lives, it seems clear that whatever was seeded in the fall is now buried deep in the snow, frozen over and winter killed. Many demoralized people recognize this “dead of winter” metaphor as an all-too-apt description of their bleak inner lives. Hidden Wholeness, p.82 At some point in our journey, we encounter winter. Unexpected losses, disillusionment, discouragement, depression, anxiety, additctions...it can take many forms, and it can come more than once, leaving us feeling frozen and fenced in. Palmer himself came through a time of deep clinical depression, and knows that wintry feel well. Yet when we understand winter in the natural world, we realize that what we see out there is not death so much as dormancy. Some life has died, of course. But much of it has gone underground, into hibernation, awaiting a season of renewal and rebirth. So winter invites us to name whatever feels dead in us, to wonder whether it might in fact be dormant – and to ask how we can help it, and ourselves, “winter through.” Hidden Wholeness, p 82. (And just in case anyone is wondering, these photos are from last winter. There a a few small flakes flying as I write this, but full-fledged winter has not yet arrived in northern Indiana.)
These past few weeks I've been fascinated by the variety of seed shapes and seed carriers I've found in the prairie plantings on campus.
Perhaps that's why my attention was caught by Parker Palmer's seasonal metaphor in A Hidden Wholeness, his book about his work with circles of trust. Usually when I think of new beginnings and seeds, I think of spring. But Palmer begins with fall when he develops a seasonal cycle as a metaphor for what happens in the inner journey of discovery. "We often start our groups in the fall, a time when work begins again for many people, following a summer break--and nature begins her work again by dropping and scattering seeds. In this season of new beginnings, a circle of trust might inquire into the 'seed of true self.' What seed was planted when you or I arrived on earth with our identities intact? How can we recall and reclaim those birthright gifts and potentials?" p. 81 Here's a few photos of seeds about to be dropped and scattered, for you to muse on as you ponder your own seeds and new beginnings. The sun was still highlighting the maple trees on 8th Street during the last half of our walk Sunday evening. We walked along Waverly, crunching leaves under our feet and smelling that leafy, autumn smell, along with an aroma of charcoal and grilled hot dogs wafting our way from somewhere in the neighborhood. There was a slight nip in the air -- felt like we should be on our way to a soccer game.
Instead we watched squirrel antics and enjoyed the golden glory of the leaves. It was a rainy weekend for the annual Assembly retreat at Camp Friedenswald, but a group of us were able to explore the woods with Carol Good-Elliott Saturday morning, before the showers started.
We ambled along, stopping to examine the diversity of shapes on sassafras trees (oval, Michigan shaped, and two thumbed), the rich purple of squashed pokeweed berries, the golden eyes of a tiny spring peeper. Carol had us using all our senses, tasting anise-y sweet cicely, listening for woodpeckers and warblers, rubbing our fingers over the raised ridges of papery beech leaves,.and sniffing spicebush and sassafras leaves (which, according to the grade school children who visit Merrylea where Carol works, smell like Lucky Charms. We went with "lemony, " or to at least one person, "Lemon Pledge"). And even with a gray damp day, and lots of brown leaves around, there were plenty of colorful leaves to admire. I began this practice of looking for the spark of light each day and then posting photos just over a year ago. We were traveling when the anniversary came round, so this is a belated noting of that marker. I continue to look for the spark of light or delight in each day, but I seem to have settled into a pattern of heading out for a longer session with my camera about once a week and then drawing on that resource to create a couple posts for the week. The cycle of seasons has now come full circle. Once again we are moving into the colder time of year here in North America, which may mean I'll occasionally do my search for light by looking back through the trove of photos that I've gathered this past year, rather than venturing outdoors. On the other hand, even the coldest winter has some warmer days. We'll just have to see what happens. And for today, commemorating the past year and its seasons, I've gone back to that trove, selecting images from this past year into a slideshow to share here. |
My approach to contemplative photography --
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver in "Sometimes" Archives
August 2020
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