The Ecology of a Life (Seasonal Metaphors for Growth)
Perhaps we need to redefine our choice of framing metaphor to something more natural, like this.
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To borrow a musical term while beginning to speak about the natural growth that rhythmically builds and recedes throughout the seasons may seem counter-intuitive at first. But consider the following definition for an ‘intro’ in music, and it’s sublime parallels with organic growth:
“In music, the introduction is a passage or section which opens a movement or a separate piece, preceding the theme or lyrics…The introduction establishes melodic, harmonic, and/or rhythmic material related to the main body of a piece.”
(Wikepedia entry for “Introduction (music),” accessed September 25th, 2015).
If we consider the Parker Palmer’s essay “There is a Season” as our establishment of the melodic harmony foundational to the consideration of seasonal metaphors as the most apt naming of our growth experience throughout life, then perhaps the seasons as metaphor is akin to the slow, rhythmic introduction of an epic movement in a musical score. As Palmer writes,
“If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture – it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we ‘grow’ our lives – we believe that we ‘make’ them.” (Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, pp. 96-97).
Considering the phrasing by which I frame my perspective on developmental growth is crucial for my ability to engage said growth wholeheartedly. And so, I ask you to consider how you actually change:
Do you mature through organic growth – or mechanical manufacturing?
Do you change through a malleable responsiveness to the ‘season you find yourself within,’ or through an almost mechanical, pre-determined choice that is out of your hands?
Is your framing device agricultural or manufactured in nature?
Palmer asserts that we as human beings possess a deeply embedded ecology to our lives, a created nature “that makes us like organisms in an ecosystem: there are some roles and relationships in which we thrive and others in which we wither and die” (Let Your Life Speak, p. 44). If we own this reality as deeply true, that the growth inherent in human beings is dissimilar to the robotic automation that dominates Henry Ford’s modern-day automobile assembly line in 2015, and in greater melodic harmony with the slow transformation of an acorn seed into an oak tree, then the seasons as metaphor for our growth as human beings is spot on.
What if there was a spring, summer, autumn, and winter to our lives?
What if we experienced the tenacious birth (or re-birth) of spring’s explosion of life and colour,
the communal abundance of summer’s bountiful harvest,
the melancholic beauty of autumn’s diminishment,
and the purifying clarity that winter’s rigours bring?
What if this seasonal metaphor was cyclical and overlapping throughout humanity in the same moment – that your spouse was buried within winter’s rigorous blizzards while you were were slogging through the mud and muck of early spring, a “muddy mess [in which] the conditions for rebirth are being created?” (Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak, p. 103)? What if your father was slowly facing the melancholic beauty of his own diminishment, the autumn of his ageing, while your colleague at work was continually overwhelmed by waves of joy, summer’s harvest literally overrunning her heart?
Perhaps there is an ecology to our life after all, and the seasons serve as metaphors for the growth ahead. After all, a Creator first breathed life into our nostrils from the dust of the ground, in the middle of a bountiful garden that was always intended as our home.
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“They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendour.”
(Isaiah 61:3b, NIV)