Summer's Coming!

Wisdom of the Season

“Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real.”

Parker Palmer (Let Your Life Speak)

Last Sunday morning, I taught the youth class a little bit about the Native American Medicine Wheel. It's been some years since I've worked with the wheel as a teaching and meditation tool, but I used to carry a basket of white stones in the trunk of my car, so that wherever I went, I could make a Medicine Wheel. It is such a good metaphor for life, the best one I know, to get across the interplay of the opposites that permeate our inner and outer existence.

Take now, for example; we are leaving spring and heading into summer, moving from east to south on the wheel. We associate summer with freedom because school is out, we take vacations, and our days are less planned and hectic than in other seasons. In summer everything blooms and turns so many shades of green our eyes can scarcely take them in. Days are long and nights are short and we are naturally more active. The garden is full of fruits and vegetables; there is much fertility and growth. Summer corresponds to that period in our lives when we, too, are fertile and full of potential growth—our youth, young adulthood, and child bearing years. The sky is the limit, love abounds and freedom rules.

Summer also has its downside; fleas, ticks, poison ivy, weeds, wild fires, mosquitoes, sunburn, hurricanes and heat-stroke, just to name a few. Today in Birmingham, we have a heat advisory and high ozone levels. It's is going to be a long, hot summer here. It's hard to be creative when you're cooking in your own juices, y'all. We may also pass through our fertile season without the love and relatedness characteristic of this life stage, which brings feelings of loss and grief. We can overextend ourselves and become too productive to manage life comfortably. Our increased activity may cause exhaustion and burn-out. Every season has its darkness and summer is no different. The good news is that, like the season, this too shall pass, and we will learn important lessons to carry forward.

Luckily, we have many summers in our lives—times when we are particularly creative and productive. We may be well beyond our years of fecundity and still experience the freedom and abundant relatedness of the season; the form will be different—less pressure-cooker, more water-cooler. Sometimes, the fruits of seasoned-summers are sweeter by far, and juicy and delicious. I wish that for you today.

In the spirit,

Jane