I started coming to our neighborhood park regularly near the end of spring last year. Our dogs are not “Maine” born and bred and it took a while for them to understand the principles of being off-leash on a town trail – to understand they weren’t in Kansas anymore, or Texas as it were. Gone were the days of running free on 25 acres (35 if you count the neighbors). But we were all in need of a daily dose of nature and with this park being right near the end of our street, and such a good one to boot, we started going. The earlier we went, the less likely we were to run into anyone on our way in, so by the time we would meet someone, the dogs would have had a chance to burn off a little bit of their natural crazy.
I’d been to the park on my own several times over the two years we’d been living here, but never quite so religiously. Over the next few months, we had a front row seat to each season’s magnificent showing – The Glory of Spring, The Glamour of Summer, The Majesty of Fall, The Magic of Winter. Each version comes with its own different kind of beauty, telling its own story, revealing its own perspective. It’s funny how similarly that sequence can reflect life – each one of the seasons corresponding with a particular stage of life.
In most cases, we tend to correlate the seasons to age. Spring is our youth that fades into a summer of adulthood. In middle-age our leaves began to fall and winter is where we just fade out, like the snowflake that disappears without much fanfare. Well, I say, what a crock. That analogy has us actively dying halfway through the process and it places a pall over the entire life experience.
The reality is, we begin to die the moment we are born.
And once we understand the beauty of life and the gift of living, each and every season is precious and special in its own right. Each and every season has its own glory, its own mystery, a grandeur of its existence, as well as its own challenges. And each “season” doesn’t necessarily only come once.
We tend to see the “highlights” that mark and categorize these seasons of our lives. The big wins, the losses that break our hearts…significant moments, the ones that leave their mark. Those are the shots that make it into the photo album of our lives – the dewy awakening of a spring bud, cobwebs heavy with drops, a blurred backdrop promising more; the full bloom of a summer day while a stream gurgles and washes over stones along the side of a trail; the foliage burning bright at its peak; the magic of the first big snow with the promise of cozy cocoa and s’mores waiting inside next to a warm hearth. It’s easy to let the more dramatic snapshots of our landscapes blind us to the more banal aspects of life.
There’s a period between the majesty of fall and the magic of winter when the beauty of fall has faded and before the ground has shrugged into the thickness of a white winter coat. Everything seems so bare, more plain somehow. How stark and empty it looks by comparison. You can see things you couldn’t see before…maybe because they were hidden behind a growth of flashy abundance or camouflaged by the distraction of the beauty that suffocated it.
This is the in between, the barren period of one season giving way to another, and there really isn’t a name for what it is. It isn’t known for its beauty, its growth. It’s neither a beginning nor an end…it’s simply an in between, a period of almost imperceptible transition.
For once, I let myself see it for what it was, to observe its course and understand the value it serves. It gives us a break from those demanding seasons. It allows the distractions to be removed, the need for hurry to be put away, a period of stasis can be achieved, if only for a short interim of time. There’s room to breathe in the in between.
Each day I watched as more of the forest was revealed, as layers fell away. In branches and behind logs I spied the homes and burrows of woodland creatures. Their tracks and trails were more apparent, revealing more intricate ways and means than I had realized they might. Evidence of the life being lived in the in between.
I could see my own life there…how I’ve been able to find clarity in the in between. I’ve found healing there, too, and in its quietude, experienced revelation. If I’m honest with myself, I might say that my spirit has even yearned for the in between when the full bloom of a season threatened to drown me with its overwhelming powerful nature. Seasons are meant to be lived out loud, celebrated, perhaps shared.
But the in between is for me. It allows me to examine my life at its most basic, stripped of spectacle, of illusion, leaving only the qualities that are real, that are enduring. The in between challenges me to find beauty in its very existence regardless of the nonofficial status of its claim. And claim it, I do. It is for me. It is mine, and mine alone.