seasoning life

What if time wasn’t linear after all? What if a spiral was a better model?

This morning, as we walked along the river beach at low tide and bathed in the beauty of the early morning sun shrouded behind fog, Maria suggested that the season we have been living through has been a bit like an autumn. Autumn is a time of shedding, when external growth slows and nature begins to retreat into itself. The environment composts the unused harvest, harnessing the energy to invest back into preparation for the next season.

That’s what it has felt like. Our frequent and at times vulnerable ponderings about our living have been almost exclusively about what we need to leave behind, rather than what we need to become or achieve. We have no regrets about what we have accumulated or become, but we are increasingly committed to being and having less, by letting go and shedding. The masks and strategies we use to navigate life are revealing themselves as we push further into our inner worlds and discover psychological survival strategies we weren’t even aware of.

In the original Matrix movie, there is a scene where Neo enters a state of consciousness where he sees the code, rather than the virtual reality that it produces. It is not a perfect analogy, but is the closest sense I have for when I experience fleeting glimpses of integral living. In those moments, normal patterns of behaviour and unquestioned social protocols loosen their grip on me, facilitating connection with my true self, others and the natural world. My physical and social reality is still there (obviously), but ontologically it feels different. I glimpse it for what it is, constructed from ubiquitous stories of western status aspiration and anxiety. Instead of wanting to ‘make it’ in this world I am losing interest in, I crave authenticity, simplicity and wisdom. I want to be reintegrated into nature, to reconnect with my true self, not domesticated into an impoverished life of comfort, convenience and privilege.

Coincidentally, as I write it is the first day of the official winter season. So, if autumn is a season of shedding and slowing, then winter is for retreating and reflection, for hibernating and waiting. Preparing. When you live where we do, in the southern states of Australia, winter seems to drag on forever. Spring teases us with warmth and sunshine before we end up back in the wind and rain. And so it is with life. It is easy to think that we’ve done the hard work during autumn, that spring comes next and soon, when new beginnings start to emerge everywhere you look, and with a speed that takes our sensibilities by surprise. But winter comes before spring.

What will this winter be like for me? In my soul. I’ve written before about embracing the cold and unpleasantness in the winter weather. I saw a fabulous advertisement yesterday with Tasmanian tourism trading off it. But what about the winter in the seasonal rhythm of living? What if time takes us not in a linear progression toward growth and development, toward better, toward more comfort, more convenience, toward faster, stronger, richer? What if time was a spiral taking us through seasons where the trajectory was toward greater integrity, toward more alignment with nature and more cohesion with our true unmasked selves?

Today, we went and saw a movie. The first time in many many years. In one of the final scenes of The Salt Path, there was a conversation about being in tune with nature, where the posture of observing and behaving aligned with the rhythms of nature (in this case, inclement weather signalled by birds taking shelter) was described as a ‘salted life’. I like that.

Salting something is often described as ‘seasoning’. And so, I bring two ideas together; living life in recognition of it’s seasonal cycles, and the turn of phrase that describes living in synch with nature as ‘salted’. In these senses I aspire to a ‘seasoned life’.

I aspire to live with greater awareness and immersion in the rhythms of the natural world, both in how I embrace the seasons, but also in how I understand what is going on in my inner world. For me, it helps to understand time as a spiral with cadences within cadences within cadences.

Every day has a rhythm of reflection, regeneration, reflection and resetting, activity and shedding. Every week has a rhythm of contribution, socialising and recreation. The (monthly) rhythms of the moon go through a microcosm of the four conventional seasons reflected in the new moon (winter), waxing crescent and gibbous (spring), full moon (summer) and waning gibbous and crescent (autumn). At higher levels the clusters of years go through cycles of temperature and rainfall (albeit disrupted by global warming), and we can extrapolate all the way out to ice ages and the life cycles of stars and galaxies.

My living is also a microcosm of a bigger reality, than extends back through my ancestors and is woven into civilisations which also evolve through predictable cycles of development and ultimately toward collapse, facilitating the emergence of new expressions of human societies.

What if we thought of time as a spiral? What if the trajectory was less about growth and more about integrity?