Seasons

I didn’t have to plant a rose garden to understand why my favorite time of year has always been spring.

Like a welcome friend, it arrives about a week before my birthday. In its open hands are the gifts of warmth and beauty. And as the days of the season progress, the gifts only grow more glorious.

I’ve never met a single soul that doesn’t drink it up; not even if they vow their favorite season is summer, autumn or winter.

And that’s as it should be.

After all, every season has its splendors. Summer’s long days of emerald grandeur melt into autumn’s dazzling display of flaming hues, which gives way to winter snow sparkling in silvery moonlight. There isn’t a month of the year that lacks some redeeming majesty.

And yet, every season also harbors potential calamities. Gentle spring rains can become downpours that produce flash floods. Balmy summer temperatures sometimes escalate into oppressive heat that dries out the landscape and intensifies wildfires. Autumn and winter winds may usher in crushing storms and murderous frost.

We are obliged to experience it all. The rapturous delight and the depths of dreadfulness. The sweetly sublime and the supremely sad.

As I write this, my rosebushes are wearing dreary shades of ginger while they stand stoically in heaps of dark gray mulch. The air is sharp. Nothing is stirring except the occasional desert rabbit. Spring seems a lifetime away.

It would be easy to slip into melancholy about the state of the garden or worry whether all of my rosebushes will survive to bloom again. Neither response would be of much use against the ebb and flow of nature.

Rather, I will regard the shades of ginger like comfy flannel pajamas, the gray mulch like a woolen blanket, and the stillness like a peaceful night that invites pleasant dreams. I will replace worry with awe at the wisdom of the ultimate Spirit and the living Earth. I will rest assured that the endless Universe knows what we need and when we need it.

If my words seem more soulful than usual, it’s because the Universe is busy teaching me and mine a divine lesson. The class has only just begun, so I haven’t much to say specifically about it. That day will come. In the meantime, I will roundup my musings with these thoughts.

Every season has its purpose. I’m hardly the first writer to utter those words, and I surely won’t be the last. It’s a truth that dates to the beginning of time, and it will go on being true until the end of time.

Somewhere in the middle of that breathtaking beginning and evolutionary end, it’s up to us to find the meaning and the joy in each new day – no matter whether it seems sweetly sublime or supremely sad – and grow with it.

If the garden can do this from season to season, so can we all. Indeed, like roses in springtime, it is our destiny.