Seasons, Cycles and Ceremony

It is the oldest of all human practices to honor change...

It is Autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere. We are heading into my favorite time of the year. Merely the anticipation of what is to come stirs me into a state of excitement and relief for the inevitable arrival of…….a Winter’s long exhale…..

Seasons are cycles. Our consumer-conformist society has no use for either of these things (seasons or cycles) beyond what we might need to buy to navigate the inconveniences of the season’s weather or in order to ‘do’ a particular holiday according to whatever the hottest influencers are telling us Halloween could or ought to be. We have turned the cyclical year into a series of strung together holidays, to engage in a thing we’ve been taught is the thing we do best – consume. 

Mark Aaron Smith

I hear some people refer to the seasons as if the seasons are the hamster wheel and we are the hamster, going around and around for no good reason as if the joke’s on us. Why wouldn’t we just jump off, abolishing these inconvenient cycles altogether? In the daily flow of my well-planned life, of what possible benefit is snow? Or freezing cold?!  Or a solid week of Spring rain?! If I’m not going to change my life one bit to acknowledge and mirror the Earth’s own need to fruit and to lay fallow, or to revel in the liminal in-between stretches of Spring and Autumn that bridge the two, of course I’m going to begrudge and bemoan these irrelevant inconveniences. 

Conversely, we can live with and in the cycles. We can remember that cycles are, well…cycles! They are beginnings, middles and endings unto themselves, each phase and stage making the next one possible. I’m sitting in one of my favorite indoors spots – the increasingly uncomfortable very inexpensive chaise lounge I purchased last November as I was preparing for my annual writing sabbatical. I joked with my friends and family, calling it my ‘writing sabbatical chaise’ because it was so inexpensive I was sure it would only last the two and a half months of my sabbatical and then I’d have to take it apart and burn what I could and ask for forgiveness for the rest of it that would end up in the land fill. But here we are almost a year later, and it’s still here! From this particular spot on my sabbatical chaise I can look out into the garden full of squash, corn, tomatoes, zinnias, kale and collards. Past this beauty a see the vast fields and trees and beyond that, the gentle slope of Green and Bear Mountains with their red sandstone Flatirons and soft Pines. Except just this morning a shift has occurred.

This morning, from this spot I see that the Trees are heavy with their leaves, as if their leaves have become burdensome, and the weight of this burden is simply too much. This shift, from a kind of dancing delight with their new adornments to bedraggled fatigue seems to happen overnight. One morning (at least around here, it’s like this) I wake up and that’s that. Standing in the door, my bleary eyes barely adjusting to the first light of day as I let the dogs out, I’ll often hear myself say something like, “Oh okay…it’s time, is it?” 

The Trees are heavy and a little more somber, eager to shed. Like a dog coming out of the river they shake their limbs and sway their trunk as if trying to free themselves of this untenable burden. And it’s not just the Trees. The Air is ready to change as well, from a thing so heavy it seems on some August and early September afternoons the grasshoppers are able to actually land on it, to a purified crystalline quiet, thin and fragile even, like the first layer of thin ice that forms along the edges of the river rocks on late October mornings.

The leaves are in on this moment as well. They dry up, perhaps to make the Tree’s job of shedding them easier. For they too are tired, ready to fall to the ground like rain drops to be reabsorbed into the ever-cycling great cosmic dreaming of what will come next. 

And us? What about us in all this? It’s an impressive thing that we have so efficiently, masterfully removed ourselves from any participation or implication in the Earth’s great and wise 4.5 billion year old story of becoming – the very thing that made us possible! We seem to imagine we are not from around here and do not answer to any of its rules or responsibilities. I have never understood this. But, I grew up in a family that did not do a good job of selling me on why I would want to remove myself from the Earth’s story to embed myself in a much smaller story that seems, more times than not, to end in despair for its believers. I cannot understand why, against all data, we would so belligerently begrudge the Earth’s cycles rather than imagine She’s onto something and simply participate with them. 

And when I say ‘participate with’ the cycles I do not mean toss ourselves into the no-questions-asked ubiquitous purchasing and decorating frenzy our conformist-consumer society has offered in exchange for the true meaning of celebrations and ceremonies that honor the profound wisdom and blessing of the seasons and cycles. Setting our alarm clocks for 1am to get in line at the department store on Black Friday is not exactly a modern version of any age-old celebration for our ecological place in the Grand Array. But the act itself, setting an alarm, coordinating with family or friends to meet up, perhaps organizing who will bring the thermos of hot coffee and who will bring the muffins and sandwiches, all of that comes from the oldest of all places. A place that will remain in our bones no matter how far we get from our old and wise ceremonial roots.

This Summer I had the greatest honor and delight to officiate the wedding of the daughter I never had, Alyssa, to her dearest love Ainsley. They are both artists of such unique kinds. Their wedding, from start to finish was an art installation of soulful intention, beauty and invitation. From the Ancestor mobile to the travel altars awaiting each guest at their place setting, there was beauty, gratitude, reverence and love. It was a small wedding (as weddings these days go), with about 60 guests total. And a solid half of those guests were put to work doing something upon their arrival. Whether it was helping our dear friend Chris Muse put the table arrangements together, or decorating the Community threshold crossing, or helping to set up the bar, I watched as people who had come prepared to have an experience in that passive way we’ve come to expect our lives to unfold (to simply receive something without participating), were invited into offering something first. And what I saw was like a reconstitution of human spirit and soul, as guest after guest was forced to introduce themselves to someone they’d never met in order to accomplish the small task they’d been given. Guest after guest taking the shape of someone far more resembling our Ancestors, who are quite used to this sort of thing – traveling for a day or more to arrive at a family member’s ceremony knowing that they would be put to work to help make the event happen. By the time everyone sat down for the actual wedding ceremony, the guest body was a singular pulsating organism of joy and participation.  

We are organized to engage in ceremonies and the cycles and seasons of our lives are among the most joyful and heartbreaking, from beginning to end. We owe everything to these cycles and seasons. And if this weren’t enough to stop us in our tracks and reorient our compasses to them we, too, are seasonal. Our lives unfurl in a series of beginnings middles and ends, overlapping and spiraling. Those in places of significant seasonal shifts, or whose ancestors come from places of significant seasonal shifts, have this cadence in our blood. Our biology expects to have seasonal ebbs and flows. Those wise and well humans who live in places with less or no significant seasonal shifts have created other ways of listening to and nurturing the seasonal nature of our human biology and life itself. 

Eberahrd Grossgasteiger

I feel for those who find themselves bracing as the Autumn approaches, anticipating with dread the coming cold and dark season of inward, quiet contemplation and gestation. It makes sense in our isolated malnourished society that we would freeze and balk at the moments and extended periods of time that ask of us that we are quiet, more inward, turned more toward the understory than the culture’s overstory. If we have been unmoored from our deepest belonging, it makes sense that we would fight tooth and nail to stay in the big greening blooming abundance of the outwardly expressed seasons. It makes sense that we would shudder and quake at the thought of going quiet, allowing hibernation’s miracle of ten-heart-beats-per-minute to turn us toward ourselves and the quiet task of listening to the nascent stirrings that have yet to inseminate. 

But I am in my very most generative fullness in this place. As I look out at these Trees, heavy and shedding their leafy burdens, I feel relief and gratitude for the fact that at least for now we still have seasons. At least for now I have an uncompromising accomplice, whispering and bellowing for me to prepare. Prepare! Winter is coming and I, too, should find my place in the deep dreaming. Where, like my old Grandmothers, I will tend and mend not merely the threadbare socks and shirts of my people, but the frayed places of my own soul.