ASK ANYONE YOU KNOW
about their favourite season
and you’re unlikely to hear a
resounding cry of ‘winter!’ After
relentlessly rainy winter months, this
year’s spring and summer warmth
felt a long time coming.
Britain is famously drizzly, so
perhaps it’s natural for us to be a
nation of sun worshippers, but
personally I find the too-muchness
of summer as challenging as the
too-littleness of winter. I crave the
balance of the in-between seasons.
The crispness of autumn and the
freshness of spring delight me, as
do evenings around the equinoxes
in March and September. But with
mindful reflection, each season can
bring us its own beauty.
In eastern philosophies, the sun and
summer are associated with the
masculine principle, that ‘gogetting’
extroverted tendency
favouring action over stillness, work
over rest, achievement over
reflection. Coolness and winter by
contrast are associated with the
feminine principle, sometimes
termed ‘the energy of rest’, which
sounds counter-intuitive, but
provides a necessary
counterbalance to the masculine.
Put simply, we cannot work all the
time, neither can we be
constantly at rest.
Nature shows this
balance at work through
the seasons, and in a
society strongly influenced
by masculine ideals, we would do
well to bring our awareness back to
the natural environment to redress
the chronic imbalances in our world
and in ourselves.
Ancient cultures worldwide
understood how to live and work
with the seasons, gathering food in
summer, foraging and preserving in
autumn, slaughtering livestock and
curing meat to provide food during
lean winter months. Since the
industrial revolution, humans have
had an ‘opt out’ of seasonal living
that has become detrimental to the
planet and our wellbeing.
Following the teaching of St
Thomas Aquinas, Franciscan priest
and writer Fr Richard Rohr explains
that creation is the first Bible. Such
teaching provides a precedent
within the Christian tradition for
looking to nature to learn how to
live in harmony with the
earth, each other and
ourselves. With
alarming climate
change statistics
regularly making
headlines, there is surely
no more important time to do this.
So how can we learn to live
seasonally in today’s world?
Autumn is a transitional period.
With the heat of summer subsiding,
it is a time for slowing down our
schedules as the temperature