A reader sent me a touching message a couple of days ago, wanting to know if all was well. With my writings being less frequent these last few weeks, there was some concern. But all IS well. Very well.
Over the past few weeks, whilst I’ve been writing less frequently, my days have largely been taken up by one of two activities.
I’ve been having long, slow conversations with applicants for The Soul Circle. Hours upon hours in conversation with powerful, wonderful women, learning about their lives, opening up new ideas and possibilities.
And, when I haven’t been in conversation, I’ve been…well, I’ve been sitting outside and looking at rocks and conquers and birds and stuff. I’ve been in the garden or by the sea. I pick up a piece of driftwood and turn it over and over in my fingers for minutes at a time, feeling its smoothness and admiring its twisted shape and lines. My eyes have followed flutterbies around the garden, watching them come to rest on this flower or that. And the sycamore seeds! Sycamore seeds twizzling down to earth.
I’ve also spent longer than usual lying in or on my bed, focusing on nothing in particular and with no desire whatsoever to move and do anything else. I think people might say, if they could see me, that I was doing a lot of lazy lying around. Either that or that I’d fallen into a deep depression. To me, it’s neither.
There were moments – there have been moments – when the thought has passed through that maybe I ought to be doing more. Thoughts about how business or life (or both) might fall apart if I didn’t keep up the daily writing and sitting at my computer and just…all that stuff my time had been filled with.
But beneath those thoughts there was somehow something else – a deeper knowing that this time spent “doing nothing” and having these long, slow conversations with these women, was the most important work for me to do right now and that, when the time was right, more “action” would start up again.
There can be a lot of fear in slowing down, doing less and changing routines and rhythms that have actually been working pretty well for you in your life. Fear that maybe you might lose something and never get it back.
But I’ve come to look at this period through a lens of seasons. Summer doesn’t cling to itself in the fear that in giving way to autumn it may never get another chance. All seasons come and go, knowing that they’ll return when the time is right. There’s a knowing. A trust. This is just the way it is.
This is the way it is for you, too. All the seasons of life come and go. The difference is only the mind that won’t let go, relinquish control and allow life to do what it does so perfectly. Flow.
Yesterday I felt the shift inside to the beginnings of a new season. Ideas bubbled up as I went to sleep where before there’d been emptiness. A felt sense of movement towards more external action. The desire to create in the world. The internal work of the last few weeks and months nearing the surface. No forcing. No trying. Just a natural giving way of one season to another.
Life is a seasonal game.
Action isn’t always external. Important work isn’t always visible. There are times for things to die back and times for things to spring forth. There is beauty in every season, if we’re open to the wonder of it all. There are times of quiet to gather energy and times when all that energy bursts through into colourful life.
Life is a seasonal game.
What would it be like if, as summer trusts autumn, trusts winter, trusts spring – you trusted the seasons in your own life and let yourself sink into that flow?
Love and courage,
Leah