Different Seasons

We switched our beach timeshare week this year so that Grace could join us.  Last year her AB Tech class conflicted, and our beach week just wasn't the same.   So here we are at Atlantic Beach, NC in May as opposed to September.  After 20 years of vacationing in this exact spot each September, it's striking to see the differences in May.

Usually the season is ending, the businesses are weary of the tourist grind and looking forward to the rest that comes with cooler weather and the slower paced off-season life.  At the stores, beach accessories are well picked through with many on clearance.  The mosquitoes and other insects are ubiquitous at dusk and dawn.  The ocean air is breezy but consistently hot.

A rainy morning at the beach, good for contemplation...

May beach air is still breezy but cooler.  The rain we are experiencing this morning is certainly not one of the hurricane-season fronts that settle in solidly each September.  This rain is more like a friendly acquaintance stopping by for a spell without wearing you out.  Grace, our rain lover, and Rose, her reluctant companion, are out walking the shore in the misty rain.  Good for them.  A rainy beach holds its own kind of beauty.

The stores are bursting-- glutted with every category of shiny beach merchandise, ready to roll, gearing up instead of down as Memorial Day approaches.  The local business community reminds me of teachers in the fall--with everything before them, re-energized, friendly, prepared and willing.

We all have the rhythm of our seasons, don't we?  Some communities, like college towns and beach spots, move to the rhythms of the school season or the waves of passing tourists.  In Asheville, we particularly feel the migration of the Floridians arrive in the spring and the leaf tourists in the fall, but more and more, it feels busy, especially downtown, more often than not.

Individually, each month, the majority of women are pulled by biological rhythms, their hormonal cycles affecting not just their physical comfort and mood, but often ushering in days of vulnerability and uncertainty.  At least for me, I feel as if my walls are broken down each month during this time. Small things pierce deeper.  I have to "talk to myself" more, remind myself that my cycle is "just a passing season" too.

If we have school-aged children, we dance to the rhythms of the school year.  Homeschool rhythms may be slightly more flexible, but they determine the pace of things too.  Many businesses have yearly rhythms as well---retail stores gaining power as they peak before Christmas, accountants busy in the spring, each trade has its own seasons.

Then, there are the seasons of life--birth, young children, teenage years, then college into adulthood, early family, empty nester, retirement age, and the age of renewed increasing dependence.  We feel life particularly unjust when these seasons are prematurely rattled or disrupted.  We lament the fast passage of time, the relentless march of one season into the next.  If only the seasons would linger, we say...

So we move through these many seasons, most of the time only lightly aware of them.  We feel them most at their edges.  We notice the sometimes striking transitions from one to the next.  Sometimes the transitions are blurrier: when was the last time I picked up Rose?   When was the last time I nursed?  When did they stop calling me mommy and start calling me mom?  Perhaps we are happiest when least aware of the seasons, just getting about enjoying whatever season we find ourselves in.

Some of us are clearly better at adjusting to new seasons than others.  Some feel every bump as they shift, while others are more even-keeled as they plod on.  Some of us can even get stuck in a particular season; life moves on, but we continue to live in whatever season felt most comfortable, most like home.

Sometimes I wonder about seasons in Heaven.  I think of Isaiah 11--the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and goat, cow and bear...the disruption of the "natural cycle" of food webs and the end of sorrow and death.  I'm glad our cat will no longer be bringing us baby birds, but I'm not sure what the new creation will mean for plant life and and the four seasons.  In Narnia it was "always winter and never Christmas," and I can't image being stuck in one season in Heaven feeling healthy either.  All seasons bring their beauty, each making the next sweeter and building up each other.  I can't imagine the seasons being complete without such progression.

CS Lewis and his brother Warren delighted in the small pleasures and charm of each season. After reading many of C.S. Lewis' letters which often speak of the seasons and nature, I found the same love and attention to nature running through his brother Major Warren Lewis' diaries.

They walked often and enjoyed the changing landscapes.

Some of my favorite writings in this regard reveal keen observations of the weather and the detailed nuances of each season.

Here are two particularly special passages from Warren Lewis' diaries:

"I enjoyed the walk in gentle steady autumn rain, smoke curling up slowing from the cottages, and the patter of the rain on the still brown trees: some people find this sort of thing depressing, but I don't:  the fact of the matter is that unless one's liver is out of order, no sort of weather is depressing unless it is physically uncomfortable; and (though few people agree with me here) the country is beautiful at all seasons of the year."  -Major Warren Lewis, Brothers and Friends, Tuesday, 7th October 1930

And another while he was based at Aldershot, a town in Hampshire England known as "Home of the British Army":

"But when I was passing just such a place the other evening I took shelter under a bush from a flurry of snow; as it passed over a low gleam of setting sun flashed out across a little level heath and lit a row of tall beech trunks dazzling white against background of dull green.  The beauty of it took my breath away, and as I walked on it occurred to me that the real asset of life is that beauty never dies, and is to be found anywhere and under any circumstances--even in Aldershot."  -Sunday March 1st, 1931 

You are God's Field

Christopher Lloyd's Great Dixter, front meadow, Northiam, UK

The Bible is rich with agricultural imagery.  Often I think of the images while out in the garden, pulling this or planting that.   The Parable of the Sower is a particularly deep well that comes to mind again and again, but there are many others as well.

Currently, I'm reading 1 Corinthians, one of my favorite books of the Bible--and not because of "the love chapter" (1 Cor 13) either which I feel has been mangled and waved around until it feels limp and lifeless to me.

But, here, at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, Paul addresses division and jealousy within this church, a congregation beset by man-centered factions and petty distinctions.  Paul strives to put their focus back on God.  Why is this such a hard focus to maintain?  We lose our way so easily....

For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," are you not being merely human?
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each.
I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.
So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor.
For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.                              -1 Corinthians 3:4-9

We are God's field.  Note that it's a collective concept.  Often, I'm tempted to diminish the corporate aspects of His Church, but clearly that's the vision here---not individual plants but the field.  Also, the focus is not on who does what.

We struggle with these principles in our household daily:

"That's not my dish.  Why should I have to pick it up?"

"I didn't leave that towel on the floor."

The trashcan is over-flowing, the rug remains crooked, the clean dishwasher sits there, unless I empty and straighten, or directly direct...which is tiring and adds a sense of weariness to the atmosphere.  

Is this a whisp of Paul's frustration--always having to redirect, refocus, reframe the larger goal as they became distracted with the pieces?