The Wisdom of Summer

In summer we are drawn upward like ripening corn, feeling ourselves expanding, reaching and unfurling into shapes our winter gestation and springtime birthing only imagined. If winter taught us to wait and spring awakened our possibilities, then summertime calls us in this present moment to fully come into our own. Summer is the season of bright light, deep perspectives and bold realizations.

Come to fruition. Something has been moving in you, rising through you, trying to be born. Now is the time to let it out. Let your plans and projects reach their apex. Pull the trigger. This is your year. All the waiting, withdrawing, nurturing and messiness of birth is behind you. Let your life take its natural shape and proudly proclaim your fullness. The Tao te Ching says that “if you force a project to completion, you ruin what was almost ripe.” But what if it really is ripe? Then let it drop. Allow the natural progression of your life to proceed unhindered. Don’t interfere with the great unfolding. Bear witness to your own fulfillment.

Don’t hide your gifts. Walk out into an apricot orchard. Look how an apricot tree turns the light of the sun and the nourishment of the soil into fragrant golden globes of juicy perfection. Fruit is a gift to be shared, a sweetness distilled from the dark of night and long hot days, a moment of fleeting glory bringing sustenance and delight to a hungry world. Your life is a similar gift the universe gives to itself. As the life-force pours through you it culminates in gifts of love, beauty and service. Hiding your gifts is a crime. They are not yours to hide. Shyness and false humility is an ego disease, a fearful and small-minded form of self-preservation. But all that’s preserved is a pitiable isolation and the deep sorrow of an unrealized life. “What shame,” the Afghan saying goes, “to die like a pomegranate with all one’s seeds still locked inside.” Because finally, the fruit you share bears seeds that will grow, bloom and bear fruit in the lives of others.

Get out. Summer calls us to the great outdoors. Holed up all winter, busy as beavers all spring, summer is the time to walk away from our desks and get out under a wide open sky. For a million years our ancestors lived in forests, savannas, deserts and alpine valleys. It was only yesterday that we invented ceilings and these confounded electric lights. Modern life has insulated us from the very cycles and processes of the natural world that gave birth to us – we have forsaken our mother. That restlessness you feel might be your soul’s longing for home, for we are made – body, mind, heart and soul – from the elements of the natural world. Summer is the time to step back into the primal home of our Pleistocene ancestors. Garden, gather, hunt, fish, camp, wander and wonder at the depth and breadth of our sweet mother earth. Embrace the life and death process by which nature feeds itself in a never-ending array of transformation. Feel the earth beneath your feet. Let a campfire, a ring of trees and a star filled sky be your home.

Unwind. Let the warmth of summer soften the coils of worry and woe that bound you during the long months of winter and spring. Emergence and becoming are naturally stressful and fraught with uncertainty. But now the course is set, the sails are full, whatever will be will be, and the peace of allowance drifts over us like the warm scent of jasmine blossoms. Find a hammock and let a whispering canopy of leaves and a veil of dappled light untie the knots that tangle your heart.

Rest. After the rampant growth of spring, when cells multiplied at a furious pace and expansion trumped every other concern, summer brings a welcome respite. Now it’s time to simply enjoy who we are, where we are and how far we’ve come. Savor the beauty of the world not for what it could be, but for what it is right here, right now. Gather some friends. Share the joys of the table. Waste away an afternoon on the beach. Skip dinner because the sunset is so beautiful, then eat cherry pie and ice cream with the abandon of a twelve year old. Drop your expectations, your tactics, your shoulds and shouldn’ts and simply let the world be what it is today. Take a break from your brilliant plan. Stop being so interested in what you think, and turn your attention instead to anything and everything but you. When we soften our grasp and let it be we enter into a necessary and nourishing time of rest and restoration, a season of Sabbath, a vital shift from human doing to human being. Every wave that crashes slips passively, restfully back into the sea. What made you think you could accomplish more by ceaselessly surging?

Allow joy. When we unwind and move toward restfulness, our eyes, ears and hearts open like pores in the heat of July. Suddenly life gets a little easier and we return to a simplicity our busy mind cannot understand. Old forgotten joys return to us – the perfection of peaches and cream, diving into a cool clear mountain lake, the smell of the grill at the neighborhood block party. It is in these moments we realize that joy is not something we have to strive for. It is not a hard-won prize that lies at the end of a long road of struggle and achievement. Joy is an ever-present mode of consciousness that our busyness and striving smother, like a wet blanket over a fire. When we pull back and rest in the presence of the here and now, joy naturally arises of its own accord. It is not something we create. It is something we allow and perceive when we have the ears to hear, the eyes to see and the heart to feel it. Our job is not the manufacture of joy but the inner work that moves us into receptivity and allowance.

Marvel and wonder. In the end, summer is a time of great miracles and endless magic. There is no limit to the boundless mystery of existence, and in the long warm days of summer this infinite parade goes right through our heart like cupid’s arrow. We fall in love with the messy world just as it is, and we feed on the bounty at our feet. We become again as a child, and gaze in wide wonder at rivers meandering through meadows of columbine in a lingering twilight while in the distance lilting fireflies grace the boughs of the darkening trees, and high above, the stars one by one return to take their rightful place in the order of things. We stand on the shore of a vast ocean. Our toes are barely wet, but we feel in our soul the infinite reach of the cosmos present in every grain of sand. In the loving gaze of our dog, in the kindness of a stranger on the train, in the unearned grace of good fortune, we feel the divinity of a purposeful, meaningful universe – a place where we belong, where each of us teaches, learns and grows in the wisdom of summer.

The Wisdom of Winter

Just as each of the seasons of our lives – infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age – bring their own challenges and rewards, so too each season of the year offers an opportunity to shift into deeper awareness and align our lives with the larger forces around us. Every season is an invitation to reorient ourselves to the wider world, and as the world changes around us, we too are changed.

Winter is subtle – it hides its treasures beneath a blanket of cold, grey stillness. It reminds us that nothing is ever known by its surface alone. We have to go deeper. And nothing invites us so powerfully into the depths of our own lives as the wisdom of winter.

Slow down. Winter teaches us to move differently. In the rain and snow we change our pace. Slipping and falling on ice is sudden – the first sign of trouble is your skull smacking the ground and your groceries skittering down the driveway. Haste does indeed make waste, and not just the spilt milk. Rushing ahead to some imagined goal, we miss the ordinary perfection of the here and now. Why we are so eager to abandon this now moment in exchange for an illusion is a mystery wise women and men have been pondering for eons. Even though it is counterintuitive and paradoxical, all our best evidence points to the fact that slowing down gets us farther.

Withdraw. In winter, plants and trees draw their energy down and into the roots. They drop their blossoms and leaves and take on a dull, dusky hue. No longer concerned with outer growth and attracting attention, they shift inward and settle down for a long, slow period of stillness. Safe in the knowledge that a far-away spring will one day awaken them from their dream world, they rest peacefully, nested where they stand. Winter is also a good time to drop our busyness, pull back from the realm of achievement, and retire from the ceaseless competition that normally characterizes our lives. It’s O.K. if you don’t answer every email, voice mail and text message. Your silence is answer enough for now.

Take comfort in simple things. The days grow short and the nights grow long. Cold winds bring rain and snow clouds from the north. Walking through your neighborhood in the falling darkness you see the lights of home and the smoke from the chimney trailing out across the stars. On the porch you kick the snow off your boots and inside you hang your coat on the hook by the door. The smell of the soup rises up like a prayer of thanks to the earth and you let it soften your heart and unwind the last coils of your busy mind. You break bread with the ones you love by the fire. No Taj Mahal or Palace of Versailles could possibly compare with the joy and comfort of your own four walls. A hot bath, a warm bed and clean sheets are all you need to ever know about heaven.

Learn how to wait. Winter places everything on hold. Time slows down to a crawl. It’s dark most of the time. There’s nothing you can do to change any of this. The bulbs of spring lay dormant under a blanket of snow. It takes some imagination to see a white snowfield as a colorful meadow of columbine, but that’s what it is – the two contrasting conditions separated only by time. Winter withers our demands by simply waiting them out. Winter helps us leave behind our tiny orbits of craving and satiation by lifting us into the infinitely generative cycles of the natural world. As we surrender to the larger forces around us we are liberated from our small-minded petulance. We let go of me-time and enter into the grace of eternity.

Learn how to trust. A hibernating bear surrenders to a deep unconsciousness, trusting in the safety of its cave. We too can learn to trust, safe in the knowledge that the wheel of the heavens is turning without our anxious interference. Trust is an opportunity waiting for us within the core of each moment. Religious people call it faith. Simply put, it is the consciousness of optimism – the knowledge that despite current appearances, the universe is by nature an abundant field of unlimited possibility. Contrary to popular usage, faith is not believing in things for which we have no evidence. Faith is a way of being in the world, an empty-handed acquiescence into the wonder of it all, a deep and joyful knowing that we absolutely belong here. Faith is the simple-hearted recognition that despite all the temporary set backs, in the long run the universe is conspiring in our favor.

Renew and restore. In winter the earth and all her energies turn inward because without this necessary time of rest, the bursting forth of spring and the bounteous fruition of summer would not be possible. Winter and summer are not two separate things – they are two points on one circle. The circle cannot be broken anywhere without damaging it everywhere. Taking the time to rest and restore your body, mind and soul is an essential and often-overlooked aspect of our productive creativity. It is literally true that sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing.

Let silence speak. In winter the world lies muted under a blanket of silence. The raucous frenzy of the spring mating season is months away. A few remaining birds stare silently from their frozen perches, their coal-black eyes set deep in their ruffled faces. The voices of hidden springs are muffled beneath thick drifts of snow. Only a faint wisp of wind high in the pines reminds us just how silent it really is. In our own lives, winter calls us away from the clatter and clamor of the world of commerce and so-called productivity, and invites us into the wide open space of our own weariness. We sit bone-tired on the bus, or stuck in rush hour traffic. We wait for the light to change. We stand in the driveway under a full-moon sky and taste tomorrow’s rain on the wind. We are inspired by the unexpected kinship we feel with these fellow travelers all just trying to go home, and with this moon, and with this wind, and with tomorrow’s rain. And we have no words, no clever thoughts with which to frame all of this unmediated experience. It feels right not to talk. Winter has shown us how. And in the silence we hear the words that can never be spoken, the melody that can never be sung, and the knowing that can never be grasped. And in that moment we are amazed, and we know now how to go on.

Winter gives us all of these things and asks for nothing in return. It doesn’t need anything. In fact, it is busy letting go of what little it has. And in the letting go there is a great freedom, a great emptiness, and great openness and a great clarity. We have only to slow down, wait, trust and feel ourselves awakening to the wisdom of winter.

To Live Deliberately

The campfire faded down to a bed of embers. Lori had already crawled into the tent and fallen asleep. I heard her deep and steady breathing.

Lying on the ground and looking up at the stars I felt the pull of gravity pining me down like a moth on a corkboard. A warm desert wind moved through the sage. The stars spread out in a vast field from one rim of the horizon to the other, too many to count. The darkness seemed insignificant in the light of all those blazing suns.

A deep and timeless silence fell over the desert.

I shifted.

Suddenly I was looking down at the stars.

They were spread out beneath me in a vast emptiness. Normally we think of the stars above us and the earth below, but in a surprising reversal of relational perspective, I was certain that I was glued by gravity to the bottom of the earth, peering down into a pool of boundless space below me.

The vertigo passed in an instant, eclipsed by a warm sense of peace and a deep surrender. I felt oddly safe and entirely lucid. The earth above me and the sky below – I wondered why this had never occurred to me before.

And with this came a knowing – all perspectives are relative. There is no such thing as up or down, over and under, above or below. Those terms only make sense from one limited point of view. If you move out of your own perspective (or any singular point of view) and take on instead a universal perspective, all orientations dissolve and there is only here, now. In other words, if you drop your local awareness and adopt a non-local awareness, you see in one singular moment the incomprehensible oneness of all existence. Freed from a parochial, provincial orientation where one ego-identifies with a particular time and place, you move instead into the formlessness of Being itself, an expanded consciousness where the ego recedes to its rightful place, as a captain of a tiny vessel, not lord and master of all it surveys. You don’t have to go anywhere to get this awareness. You’re always in it. You have only to shift. But going to the desert helps.

One of the great services wilderness provides is this opportunity to leave behind our small view of the world. As we leave the city and head into the hills we enter a realm of existence where nature reigns and the arising and fading of forms unfolds in an endless symphony utterly apart from the machinations of human activity. Stepping out of the car and walking into the woods or the desert or along an empty shore brings you into direct contact with a timeless presence untrammeled by the human mind, well, until we get there anyway. Spending time in nature gives us a chance to take a break from the torrential thought stream and its oh-so-important assessments and judgments. And when we do, we have a shot at recovering our original simplicity, our primal purity, our childlike awareness, that Garden of Eden consciousness where we walked in the cool of the evening with God, and we didn’t even know that we’re different from anything we saw.

It’s not our mind’s fault that we’re so easily trapped in an illusion of separateness. It’s just doing what it’s supposed to do – naming everything, judging everything, ascribing value to everything, craving, pushing away and attaching to everything. Bravo mind. Nice job. Keep it up. We need you. But once in a while, it’s nice to remember who’s really in charge. Once in a while it’s nice to say, mind, you work for me, not the other way around. Thanks for everything you do, but go ahead and take the rest of the day off.

In Walden, everybody’s all-time favorite back-to-nature manifesto, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” To deliberate means to cautiously reason our way toward the ideal. And how can we live deliberately if we don’t understand the essential facts? For this process to work, we have to have good information. As you deliberate about the big questions like what is the good life, what is the purpose of life, what is the purpose of my life, what should I be doing with these few short years I have left, isn’t it supremely important to first understand the most important question of all: what am I? Only in nature, or better yet, wilderness are we unceremoniously stripped of all our careful constructions and reduced to our essential core – simple, unadorned, non-local awareness. We are no long defined by the social roles and definitions that layer over us like sediment. We realize that beneath all the layers we are pure, undifferentiated consciousness. With this essential fact in hand, we can re-enter the human world of family, job, duty, citizenship, moral obligation, creativity and community with a new-found sense of direction and purpose. We know now what this is all for. Our priorities have been re-ordered. Our eyes are firmly set on what really matters. And we are willing to let the rest go.

Wilderness has always been our greatest teacher. For millennia, humans have known that despite the comforting safety of our shelters, it is only when we step out under the sky unprotected that we emerge like birds from the confines of our shells. We need the nest, but we need the sky more.

Although it’s been years, I carry with me that night in the desert when I, for a few fleeting moments, saw the stars spread out beneath me like a sea of pearls. That one shift, that reorientation, forever loosened my attachment to the fleeting forms of the world and the careless devotion we place in our limited perceptions, assessments and judgments. I know now that there are not only two points of view for every problem – there are millions. I know that I can set myself free anytime I want from the Promethean chains that bind us all to a dangerously small view of the world and of ourselves. I know now that it is not only possible, but it is absolutely necessary for my survival and for the survival of the entire planet that we learn to live from the core truths of our existence and not the surface trivialities, that we learn to live as if it mattered, that we learn to live deliberately.