I see Frank just about every day when I walk my dog at Stuyvesant Park. He sits in the same place. The day after Daylight Savings Time, I noticed he was shivering because the sun had changed and was no longer lighting his bench at 8 a.m. I said, "Frank, you are shivering. Move over to the bench in the sun. " "No," he said with more vigor than you would expect from an 80 year old homeless man. "This is my bench."
Before you make too much fun of Frank's cold rigidity, hear my thesis for the day. Life is seasonal, which is to say, it shifts: the sun shifts, the moon shifts, time shifts. Daylight is saved and then spent. But we don't necessarily enjoy the same seasonality, as human beings. In fact, we'd rather shiver in the cold. I know we are in the "hope stretch" of the Silly Season right now - and I also know it is almost over. But hear these words of one politician describing the rest of us: "We are in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone is arguing over where they are going to sit." Indeed, quite the conversation has developed this week about something that John Kerry said. It was a reverse appreciation of seasonality in its intent but it turned in to a "dis" - and we are still arguing over what it meant. Hear his words: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
Kerry was warning against the stuckness on behalf of the change or growth or development of education. I am going to do the same today. Stuck can feel safe but is usually just the opposite. I know Frank really likes his bench. But, you know, it wouldn't kill him to move every now and then.
Seasonality is living well with change. It is motion on behalf of security. It is getting in the last picnic before the summer is over and finding the gloves before you need them. It is not getting stuck in Iraq.
Walter Brueggeman says, in The Psalms and the Life of Faith, that the Psalms are movements from orientation to disorientation to reorientation. That is the dance that takes us through life. We are happy. We get sad. We succeed. We fail. We rise. We fall. Things change. Whether or not we adapt to the change is quite another question.
I know a formerly great church in Philadelphia that keeps the former pastor's glasses on his desk and his bible open to the page where he left it when he died 35 years ago. No, they have not been able to keep a new pastor. Many people prefer museum to motion.
Improvisation is another positive way of talking about seasonality. Margret told me the story of two drummers drumming for a gift on the subway. They were seated on the floor. Another man heard the music, and jumped down on the floor and added his guitar. Now, that is music. That is motion. That is seasonality.
Substitute the world seasonality for spirituality in your life and see what happens. Iraq goes without saying: We are stuck and we are swamped there. Kerry told the truth, everybody knows it, and the only people who don't get it are the people who don't listen to the soldiers telling us why they went. "Because when I get out maybe I can get an education." Duh.
Stuck has many sides. Hal Taussig has studied the 1200 or so churches that are like ours: feisty, love questions more than they love answers, make space for believers and unbelievers and everybody in between, have a strong social justice and arts frame, etc. He adds one more criteria, which he calls "Heroic Marginalization." The sense that we are alone and unique. Seasonality instead of stuckness would look around and see that we are indeed unique but unique in a fairly common sort of way. We are not alone in the universe. We are part of a movement. The same way we won the 2000 election. See, if you start thinking you are a winner, instead of a loser, part of a group, rather than all alone, you have less need to fight over your seat in the car or hang on to your cold bench. You can reorient.
Life may be just a great kiln where clay battles fire. We are surely people who wake up in the morning and are stunned by what has happened. I think of the horrifying death of our neighbor and indie journalist Brad Will, murdered in Oaxaca. People are circulating his glorious writings - and those about the Community Gardening Movement in the Village have especially moved me. He was a man of seasons. He died too soon. He got stuck. Seasonal people are not exempt from grief or anger: we may even experience them more acutely.
People throw the world "Spirituality" around way too much. I'd prefer the concept of seasonality. When we live a deep seasonality, we have less time to fight over our seat in the car. We get what the psalmist calls "our meat in due season." We live a very daily life watching the sun change its flight in the sky. We build a wren's nest of twigs and string. We know that fallow soil is growing things the same way blooming daffodils are growing things. Underneath, in the winter, seeds are preparing for life, not death. As E.B. White said of his wife, Katherine, the winter before she died, wearing her suit in the garden, kneeling down in a cold Maine wind to plant spring bulbs she would never see, "there she was, 'Calmly Plotting the Resurrection'."
Deeply seasonal people move their bench to sit in the sun; we don't shiver in the cold.
Deeply seasonal people understand the autumnal paradox of dying and seeding. We are not fooled by surface appearances of dirt not wearing its greenery.
Deeply seasonal people are interested in the questions of whether or not we have been opened or closed by life's betrayals, whether we can touch the center of our own sorrow, or are shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. We like Geralyn Lucas' new book, Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy. We understand that seasonality gives a little sass back to life's troubles.
Seasonality is the antidote to being stuck. Season living is the antidote to stuck places.
Of course there can be great surprises, like last week's Buffalo snowstorm. We can look up one day and realize that there are 1.3 billion people in China and 1.1 billion people in India. We can just stop using the word foreigner. We are the foreigners. We are the immigrants. We are the refugees. When seasonal, we have the capacity for surprises of a seasonal nature. The world's center is shifting to the East and the South: Imagine that!
Or perhaps we were born before the time when communication became compulsory, as Andre Costezcu puts it. There is a season for solitude and interiority as well as a season for community and togetherness. There is a time, as Archibald Macleish puts it, when the human resigns from the herd. Then we live in our own thoughts and not those of the compulsory communications system.
Kanye West declares over and over again that the devil trying to break me down. Yup.
While living alone or together, marginalized or centralized, the sun keeps shifting. Things change. They will keep changing, that is the point of seasonal living.
Sylvia Plath said, in 1963, two weeks before she killed herself, that she thought there was "very few things a hot bath won't cure but I don't know many of them." There are surprises. Seasons have surprises; they are not orderly in their patterns. I have only to mention climate change to make that fact very real; only to say that, as Jim Wallis of Sojourners describes, real social change is when we change the wind. When I first heard him say that, I thought he was nuts. Now he is showing me that the wind has changed. I get it now.
Seasonality allows us to find balance in an off-balance world. Stand sometimes on one leg and you will begin to get the point about seasonality. The world is dynamic, not static. We need each other. We need something to hold on to in order to stay balanced. What happens in an off-balance world is that we keep moving toward false stabilities. False stabilities are another way of saying the word "stuck."
The Buddha says, "Only one time in which to awaken and that is now." I disagree. I think there is a time to sleep as well.
I stay alive remembering the outreach of an old apple tree and the way it carries an idiosyncratic eloquence. Season by season, the weight of its fruits has twisted each individual limb. The tree changes in shape.
Seasonality allows us to get ready for the deaths that will come to us and to those we love.
In a meditation on the long and tormented death of her grandmother, Ann Patchete says, in an article in Harper's November 2006 issue:
There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on. I am living that time with my husband now. I try to study our happiness so that I will be able to remember it in the future, just in case something happens and we find ourselves in need. These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, "How far would you go for me?" you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, "Farther than you would ever have thought was possible."
She reminds me of the bunnies my kids demanded one day on a sidewalk in Vermont. The sign said, "Free Bunnies…" I thought I could get out of the bunny business by saying they'd have to live outside and they'd have to get cold in the winter and they would die. The kid distributing the free bunnies contradicted me, in a seasonal matter-of-factness: "They grow more fur the deeper the winter is." What Patchete says in her marvelous meditation is that she never thought she'd cut her grandmother's toes or bathe her or lift her or manage her hair. She got her fur as she needed it. That is what seasonality means.
Another angle on seasonality or wind changing or life changing is from E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel:
It is amusing to listen to elderly people on this subject. Sometimes a man says in confident tones, human nature is the same in all ages. The primitive caveman lies deep within us all… He speaks like this when he is feeling prosperous and fat. When he is feeling depressed and worried by the young, or is being sentimental about them on the ground that they will succeed in life when he has failed, then he will take the opposite view and say mysteriously, human nature is not the same, I have seen fundamental changes in my own time. You must face facts…and he goes on like this day after day, alternately facing facts and refusing to alter them.
All I will do is to state a possibility. If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people…are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against this search.
Thus the novel…If the novelists sees himself differently he will see his characters differently and a new system of lighting will result. So in a crablike way…the development of the novel might mean the development of humanity.
He sees the novel as changing the way we think about ourselves. Today I recommend to you to think seasonally about yourself, about life, about politics. Instead of shivering in the cold, move to the warmth. And when it is winter, shiver.
Amen.
