I have spent this past year really and truly learning how to live in my season. Deeply grounding myself in every moment with all of my senses, noticing the subtle changes of earth and sky…Embracing the elements, all of them, and asking myself,
“What is the earth doing right now? And what does that teach me, as a human living on this same soil, about how to live?”
Autumn is for harvesting what you’ve been planting (the ideas, the vision, the seeds of your future self), and winter is for wintering.
And Spring…ah yes Springtime! I have always thought of spring as my favorite season. It’s when all the good things bloom. It’s inspiration. It’s creativity. It’s color returning to the world. It’s joyful ideas, fresh vision, and new beginnings. It’s the season of hope, when the frost has shaken off the trees and everything begins to come alive again. Spring is for planting. For blooming. For becoming something new again.
But then I got stuck in summer.
The humidity and heat arrived. The grasses and trees had finished blooming where I live, and suddenly everything was just…green and brown and dry. Hot. Still.
A fog settled over me. I felt almost complacent, wondering what I was supposed to notice now. Had I missed something? Was I stuck in Summer?
Then it struck me.
Summer isn’t asking me to become anything.
Summer is asking me to live.
If spring and autumn are the seasons of planting, blooming, harvesting, and carrying forward what matters, then winter and summer are different. They are the seasons that make the work worth doing.
In winter, we slow down to find ourselves again. We give ourselves permission to focus only on what truly matters. Winter isn’t where inspiration and big goals usually live. It’s the season that nourishes them. We rest so there is strength for what comes next.
Summer slows us down in a different way.
The thick heat invites us to stop striving long enough to actually hear our life. It’s the season when we enjoy the fruit that spring produced. We travel to family cabins, gather around campfires, visit the people we love, linger at the beach, and stay outside just a little longer because the sun refuses to set. We sit. We exist. We laugh. We find cool pools and ice in our drinks and we sit and listen to the heat of the evening with family or friends.
Summer is when we remember why we planted anything in the first place: to actually enjoy our life and enjoy the moment.
It’s the season of popsicles on the front porch. Bare feet in the grass. Listening to the birds and the crickets. Floating in a lake. Watching children run through sprinklers. Sitting around a picnic table long after dinner is over because no one is in a hurry to leave.
Summer is for being.
Winter is for wintering.
Spring is for becoming.
Autumn is for harvesting.
Summer is for living.
~Molly
