For many years I travelled continually.
I was away from home for months on end. Often I’d be packing suitcases for a new trip before unpacking from the one just finished.
I saw many wonderous things and worked with extraordinary and beautiful people.
I saw the world.
But I lost contact with the earth.
However common flight and travel has become, it’s not normal. Being packed with others into a small metal tube and hurtled at high speed 34,000 feet above the earth is not a normal human thing.
Not necessarily bad.
Just not normal.
Seasons meant nothing to me. I’d enter a plane in the frozen snow of Stockholm and exit into the thick heavy heat of Chennai.
As the first flowers appeared in my home garden, I’d leave and rememrge into denatured urban Hangzhou. When I returned, the flowers would be gone.
This disconnection from the rhythms of life was a significant factor in the physical and psychic forces which eventually broke into an overwhelming storm and crushed me.
Burnout, breakdown, illness and pandemic destroyed my career. The time for pause and reflection that quartet of disasters created, convinced me it was not a career I wanted to try to revive.
I’d had enough of leaving places.
These days I travel little. I walk each day to the sea, coach people online, write, paint, compose music, feed the birds and watch the slow growth of a forest in my garden.
It’s a life less dynamic, but in so many ways richer than the one I knew before.
The passage of the seasons in my garden reminds me to pay attention to the seasons of my mind.
There are times of storm and dark winter.
There are times of new birth, confidence and emergence.
There are times of easeful flourishing and glorious flowering.
There are times of gentle decay as what once flowered, ends.
Sometimes all four seasons visit me several times in a day.
Brian Aldiss wrote an epic series of novels known collectively as ‘Hellaconia’. They imagine a planet that rotates its sun so slowly, each season lasts for generations. People are born, mature and die all within a frozen winter or a sun-baked summer. People who are born as one season, slower that snails-pace, turns into the next, see portents of futures which will come but which they, personally, will never experience.
It’s an extraordinary novel because what it imagines is almost unimaginable. We do not live in a permanent, unchanging season. Things evolve, month to month, day to day, moment to moment.
There are times of Winter in my mind. Storms. Darkness. Threat. They’re times to find a secure place and dig into myth, story and a self-created safety. They’re when I reflect and imagine.
There are times of Spring when new shoots grow, possibilities sing from the treetops and the outside world calls. Be wary though, Winter can return in sudden late storms.
There are times of Summer when the world is generous and benign and I know it’s safe to spend full days out in the world, far from the safety of home.
There are times of Autumn when I sense things ending — cherished things — and know another cycle is reaching its close. If I’m patient, beyond the darkness that I feel approaching, there will be Spring again.
Each season is beautiful if we accept it for what it is.
Each is ugly if we wish it to be otherwise.
So too in the living of life each day.
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I coach and mentor Artists, Educators, Spiritual Workers and anyone who believes things can be better. I’ll hold a space for you if you’re ready, and together we’ll move from holding back to stepping forward.
Be in touch if you’d like to talk.