Seasons of the Heart

Hello and thanks for checking in. Today I am deviating from a usual pattern or focusing on other women and focusing a little on my life. Fall is my favorite season and is always a time of introspection.

As someone who is in her later years, the autumn of my life, I think a lot about seasons of the heart, about how much I have lived, loved and changed during various seasons in this precious lifetime that I have lived so far. These years offer such an invitation to freedom, to find meaning and joy, to let go, and be our own person. Perhaps this person has been so disguised or hidden in our earlier years, we have to be introduced to the woman who is emerging! She has a deeper quality of focus, more gratitude and does not waste time on trivial or inconsequential people or things. She has shifted gears, become more truly spiritual, reclaiming herself. She is drawn inward and has formed a whole new sense of self. Aging is a gift to be celebrated and enjoyed. It is a liberating, alchemical process. Don’t shrink from it. Revel in it.

"There are four seasons of the heart. Several seasons can be present simultaneously in the heart, though usually, at any one time, one season is dominant in your life. It is customary to understand autumn as synchronous with old age. In the autumn time of your life, your experience is harvested. This is a lovely backdrop against which we can understand aging.

Aging is not merely about the body losing its poise, strength, and self-trust. Aging also invites you to become aware of the sacred circle that shelters your life. Within the harvest circle, you are able to gather lost memories and experiences, bring them together, and hold them as one. In actual fact, if you can come to see aging not as a demise of your body but as the harvest of your soul, you will learn that aging can be a time of strength, poise, and confidence. To understand the harvest of your soul against the background of seasonal rhythm should give you a sense of quiet delight at the arrival of this time in your life. It should give you strength and a sense of how the deeper belonging of your soul-world will be revealed to you.”~

~John O'Donohue

From "Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom"

art: Pausha Foley, "The Beauty of the Inner Harvest" Sacred Dreams