Last week I talked about Old Man Winter’s current unrelenting presence. This prompted me to further examine all of the seasons as we experience them in our own lives. As you read through the descriptions below, pay particular attention to what your preferred weather season may represent in your own life.
- Spring is a time for planting and sowing. After periods of challenging life circumstances (winter), you will be faced with times of equally great opportunity. Nature awakens every spring. It’s the launching point for beauty to come. It awakens, grows, and thrives because it is meant to do so. Hold your own existence to the same standard as nature and make spring the springboard for getting where you want to go.
- Summer is for enjoying and protecting the crop you’ve sown. Summer tends to be a time of joy and comfort for most, but those crops won’t thrive without being tended to with some water, weeding out unwelcome plants competing for the resources, or allowing them to spoil by leaving them entirely unattended. Once we’ve grown a crop (achieved something in life), we must defend it, stand up for it, and protect its value.
- Autumn is a time of beautiful and poetic regression. The temperatures drop, animals wane in their presence, leaves turn, and trees gradually shed their leaves. Late summer and early fall is when we get to account for our yield from the work of the previous two seasons. We can take inventory of what our hard work produced, identify where we may have missed the mark with under performing, and prune areas which need refined in order to produce higher yields in the coming season. In doing so, we ready ourselves to face another winter. Without this season of self accountability we deprive our essence of the opportunity for renewal.
- Winter. Winter is often the most challenging season to endure. No matter what we may try to do to protect ourselves from winter, one fact remains: we can never prevent periods of winter from visiting. Rough times will come whether we welcome them or not. Seasons of winter have a way of cutting us to our core, like being stuck in the cold without a coat. Whether it’s a death, a time of financial ruin, lost relationships/friendships, or a long duration of time where everything in life seems to be stacked against us, the most fundamental factor in enduring winter is how prepared we are for it.
While the seasons naturally progress and flow from one into the next, we still take steps to prepare ourselves for the changing of the weather. There is one foundational element in preparing ourselves for our own personal seasons: dirt. What do you think of when you hear the word dirt? Does it make you want to take a shower, clean your house, or clean underneath your fingernails? Personally the word dirt takes me back to childhood. I had a strong bias against wearing shoes, and our farm did not come equipped with the plush, amply watered, and beautifully manicured lawn of current day suburbia. The major
problem with this was the fact when I went inside I could not tolerate the feeling of my dirty feet on the carpet. It was the equivalent to nails on a chalkboard for me. I would have to immediately wash my feet when entering the house or it made my skin crawl. While I was out running shoelessly wild across the farmland, some of the humans (of the parental variety) would hide my shoes to teach me to be more responsible with them. Not being able to locate my shoes when needed to embark upon a no shirt, no shoes, no service endeavor to the
local cafe for an ice cream cone was the surest thing to distract me from my dirty feet on the carpet quirk. Talk about life crises in a seven year old’s world! (If you came to visit today you would see I still haven’t learned how to put my shoes away. ‘A’ for effort though Mom and Dad!) Enough about sentimental childhood memories and back to dirt. Dirt is paramount to growing a good crop. Nothing yields better growth than a rich, well fertilized soil. We must fertilize, cultivate, and ready our mind, body, soul, and spirit in the same way farmers prepare the fields for planting and harvest if we want to produce great things in our lives.
With spring on the horizon now is the time to prepare our dirt for the richest and most prosperous of seasons ahead. Happy fertilizing! Thanks for stopping by!
Peace & Love,
Janessa