I like this excerpt from Parker Palmer's book "Let Your Life Speak" - I know people who say, "Life is like a game of chance - some win and some lose." But that metaphor can create a fatalism about losing or an obsession with beating the odds. I know of other people who say, "Life is like a battlefield - you get the enemy or the enemy gets you." But that metaphor can result in enemies around every corner and a constant sense of siege. Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield or a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or joy, loss or gain, darkness or light, but encourages us to embrace it all - and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.
If we live close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as a metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era comes from manufacturing - we don't believe that we "grow" our lives - we believe that we "make" them. From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere "raw material" that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labour on it.
Unlike "raw material" on which we make all the demands, we need to reform our culture and ego toward ways of thinking and doing and being that are rooted in respect for the living ecology of life. We are here not only to transform the world but also to be transformed. Transformation is difficult so it is good to know that there is comfort as well as challenge in the metaphor of life as a cycle of seasons. Illumined by this image, we see that we are not alone in the universe. We are participants in a vast community of being, and if we open ourselves to its guidance, we can learn anew how to live in this great and gracious community of truth. We can, and we must - if we want our sciences to be humane, our institutions to be sustaining, our healings to be deep, our lives to be true.
