Seasons of Awakening

 

09.17.2021 SEASONS OF AWAKENING We’ve arrived at the last weekend of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. This Tuesday marks the first day of autumn — a fact that feels a little bittersweet. As the warmth of summer fades away, you may find yourself already worrying about the colder days ahead, but there’s plenty to look forward to in this season of transition. As Pico Iyer writes in his Lion's Roar article, “My Private Cineplex,” the beauty of change just happens to be “the great lesson of autumn,” as the trees around us change their greenery to vibrant hues of red, orange, and gold. The three pieces in this Weekend Reader exemplify the wisdom found in the changing of seasons, urging us to trust the ebbs and flows of nature and the lessons they bring. May they help you see beauty in the days ahead. —Lilly Greenblatt, Digital Editor, Lion’s Roar

Seasons of Awakening Joan Sutherland shares why we must learn to trust the ebbs and flows of awakening — agreeing to all of its seasons and tides. Both winter and spring are part of what’s true, as are summer and autumn in their turn. In welcoming awakening’s seasonal transformations, we discover a greater truth that shows us a new way of trusting the very change we once thought a problem.

My Private Cineplex The writer’s job, says Pico Iyer, is to watch his moods and thoughts, as captivating yet passing as the seasons, and decide which are worth sharing. The skies are high and warm and brilliant in the autumn, even in early December; the parks are full of gold and yellow and scarlet. The warmth is deceiving, and yet everything is deceiving, because it’s all contradicted by everything else around it. The season cannot be quite as renewed and buoyant as the skies suggest; you can feel the sting of cold in the air. And yet it can’t be as elegiac as you suppose either, because the leaves are giving off their richest, most generous colors as they fall. You don’t know whether to feel happy or sad, which means that it’s a choice, in part — and besides, the seasons will keep turning, the colors will keep flaring, the branches will soon be bare again, and everyone will be covered up, whether you want them to be or not. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.

Do Dishes, Rake Leaves: The Wisdom of the Ancient Homemakers Karen Maezen Miller on how the domestic practice of ancient Zen masters can lead us to intimate encounters with our own lives. A part of every autumn day finds me fuming at the sight of falling leaves. Then, I pick up a rake. Tell me, while I’m sweeping leaves till kingdom come, is it getting in the way of my life? Is it interfering with my life? Keeping me from my life? Only my imaginary life, that life of what-ifs and how-comes: the life I’m dreaming of. At the moment that I’m raking leaves, at the moment I’m doing anything, it is my life, it is all of time, and it is all of me.

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