Seasons

Seasons. We shouldn’t confuse our identity with our season.

The tree in winter doesn’t appear as it will in the spring. A healthy tree will retreat into itself drawing upon the rich nutrients from deep roots buried in the life giving soil beneath the frost line.

The healthy tree will shed itself of leaves, foregoing appearances and opting instead for quiet survival until which time the sun shines again. The healthy tree is content to let assumptions and rumors persist that it is dead, because the tree is very much alive.

What others think is of no consequence to surviving the cold.

Beneath the bark is a myriad of veins pulsing with life, thought, and desire. These things are just out of sight in winter, but they do not cease to exist. The tree is waiting. Spring will return as will the tree in all of its glory.

So will you. Because you are not your season.

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

So many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something ever day.

Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing, isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and

where it was you meant to travel. None of these things will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch

And look! my last, or next to last,

of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones,

And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)

I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like

(Write it!) like disaster.”

“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop