Summer

Summer is a season of contradictions in Australia. It includes the festive season, but is also the season of the trauma of natural disasters. It is the season of struggle in the heat, but also of harvest and gluts. It moves us to the end of one year and to the beginning of the next.

Celebration and new beginnings

For many people Christmas and New Year are a time of celebration and enjoyment and this can also occur in the summers of our lives. These are the times when we can relax and enjoy life and living, and take a break from the sameness of daily routines and tasks. We can see the New Year as a time to throw a veil over the past and make a fresh start, as we step into time that has not yet been sullied with challenges and struggles.

Struggle and Endings

Conversely, summer is a time of survival, when plants struggle in the heat and may even die. In the summers of our lives we too may struggle to survive and find that we are facing the endings of some aspects, thus needing to let go of things that are no longer strong enough to give meaning to our days.

A time of harvest

Those of us who grow vegetables know that summer is the time when the fruit of our labours can be harvested. It is exciting to see the first vegetables appear, but as summer continues we may end up with a glut of produce that is difficult to deal with. It is the same in our lives – some things are interesting and exciting and fulfilling at first, but when they are experienced in over-abundance they lose their allure and may become problematic.

Natural disasters

Summer is a time of extreme weather patterns and the challenges this creates. Currently in Australia there are floods in NSW and bush fires in Victoria and Western Australia.  Both have resulted in the tragedy of losses of homes and lives, and have had major impacts on all of those involved.

I hope your summer is falling more on the enjoyable side and that 2016 is a good year for you.

Spring

Having written posts on Autumn and Winter, I could not let September go by without writing one on Spring. It would be easy to go with clichés about new growth here, but I thought I would try to dig a little deeper here.

The promise of new growth

At the beginning of Spring the promise of growth is apparent, but we have no way of knowing what that new growth will really end up looking like (apart from knowledge gained from past experience). We don’t know if trees will produce usable fruit, or how much they will produce, or whether they will be wiped out by bugs or weather events before maturity. When applying this metaphor to human life, there is even less predictability and more variables, but it is nice to experience new beginnings and initial promises of growth.

The need to prepare and nurture

In the garden, we will benefit more from the new growth if we have prepared the soil well, beforehand, and continue to feed and water the plants. This is so in human lives as well – new skills need to be practised and new ways of thinking repeated until they become familiar.

Cutting out the deadwood

As new leaves began to appear on bare branches in my garden, the deceased wood became much more apparent, and I was more confidently able to use the secateurs to cut it off and make more room for the new healthy growth. In our lives, leaving old deadwood can inhibit our ability to move into the future with confidence, and it can begin to strangle new ways of thinking and being, pulling our minds back into the negatives of the past (thereby inhibiting the new growth).

 A time to sow new things

I have been eagerly waiting for the weather to warm enough to sow seeds for flowers and vegetables and am rejoicing that the time has now arrived!  Sometimes in our lives we too need to wait for the right “climate” to make changes or take on new things, so that our efforts have more chance of succeeding.

Remember: He/ She has half the deed done who has made a beginning.  Horace

Winter

My husband and I have just returned from a month of caravanning in Tasmania in winter, spending a lot of time in the great outdoors. I also took a break from blogging, having drafted the series about the Woman on the Tightrope before we took ourselves across Bass Strait.

Winter is often used as a metaphor for the more challenging or bleak times of our lives, but there can be lots of beauty in the winters of our lives.

Beauty can come from:

• The caring and compassion of others

• The chance for us to grow and increase resilience

• Getting in touch with deeper feelings

• Experiencing the poignancy of life

• The overlapping of the seasons – autumn leaves still lingering on trees and jonquils decorating the landscape and heralding the promise of spring 

• Connecting with others who are also in winter

Some ways to survive winter:

• Immersing ourselves in it instead of trying to escape it

• Arming ourselves with survival strategies and learning new ones

• Using problem solving skills

• Placing ourselves in less testing places

• Having the courage to engage with the darkness and cold

We found lots of beauty in winter. How about you?

Autumn

The seasons are often used as metaphors for the challenges of living, and autumn is an apt one for the shedding of used baggage.

Although we have already moved on to Winter, Autumn is still lingering in the leaves on the deciduous trees.

The temptation to allow used baggage to dominate

Just as trees cloaked in their autumn hues stand out in their environment, used baggage can become quite alluring and noticeable against the background of our lives. It can this take up a lot of time and attention by dominating our thoughts as it lingers in our minds and memories.

It takes courage to allow the leaves to fall

Isaac Bashevis Singer's story of Ole and Trufa (A Story of Two Leaves) is about the two remaining leaves (and these are the strongest) hanging from a twig, who support each other to hang on through winds and storms, until one day the wind blows Ole from the tree, leaving Trufa grieving. However Trufa eventually falls as well, and finds that her new life has caused her fears and anxieties to vanish, and that she has entered a new spiritual world.

The story can be found on this link:

www.psychologytools.org/assets/files/Ole-and-Trufa.pdf

Although this story is about death and life after death, we too can find new ways of being if we allow the used baggage to fall away.

Reflecting on experiences, learning what we need to from them and moving on

Stephanie Dowrick suggests asking these questions: 

1.     What is familiar here (is this a pattern)?
2.     What were my intentions? What was I hoping for or wanting?
3.      What actually happened?
4.    How might this have looked from the perspective of whoever else was involved?
5.     What can I see now that I didn’t then?
6.    What would I do more of –or less of – another time?
7.   What insight have I now gained?

Now literally “close the book” on the experience.

Reference: Choosing Happiness: Life and Soul Essentials Stephanie Dowrick, Allen and Unwin, Australia, 2005

Her book can be purchased from Booktopia:
http://www.booktopia.com.au/choosing-happiness-stephanie-dowrick/prod9781585425822.html

An exercise in leaving negative messages behind

•  Gently shake your feet and legs, hands and arms in turn, and finish by gently turning your head from side to side to relax.
• Breathe deeply three times.
• Close your eyes and visualise a beautiful secluded beach. Blue sky, sun and the sound of waves.
• Think of a message you are carrying that you would like to leave behind. Now take your first footprint in the sand and visualise the sand absorbing this message – imagine being free of it forever.
• Go through other messages you are carrying that make life hard for you – and watch the sand absorbing and swallowing up all these bad messages – imagine being free of them forever.

      Now go and paddle in the sea, refreshed and healed.

These are just a couple of suggestions about ways to encourage unwanted baggage "leaves" to fall from the tree. What ways have you found to be helpful?