Living in Season: What does it mean?

What does living in season really mean?

For me, it has become a way of life.

It all started ten years when I lived in Egypt. In Cairo, there is a banana season, a tomato season, and an orange season. One knows that at certain times during the year, certain foods locally grown are readily available. If you buy an orange or a tomato out of the local season, you know it is probably imported and imported fruit never tastes as fresh and delicious as local ones. So I learned to go from season to season, marking the times of year by what food was fresh and local. I discovered a simple joy in living this way. Even though I lived in one of the most populated cities in the world, with all the noise pollution and the smell of burning trash, eating locally made me feel like I had stepped into another time, an old time, the time of my ancestors, a time when we lived closer to the patterns and seasons of the earth.

Then, I started having babies and as new patterns of living emerged, living in season started to have new connotations for me. Now living in season means my season of mothering. In some ways it is just like my seasonal Cairo food living. There is an ebb and flow of time, things (breastfeeding, interrupted sleep) circle back around again like the coming and going of spring, summer, autumn and winter. I know that there are stages to my child's life and it means there are stages to my life too. Patterns come and go.

I remind myself that living in season means that sometimes I go without. Going without does not mean I will never have it again, it just means that right now I am in a different time. It is easier to know that in two seasons fresh local bananas will be back again and harder to remind myself that some time soon (I hope), there will be time for long periods of prayer, meditation, and writing.

Living in season is also about letting go. Letting go of what I think my life ought to be or how I see (and imagine) someone else's life to be (and think I need it for me). It is about paying attention to where I am just now and letting go of any attachment to the desired outcomes I hold. Things like time for me will indeed come around again. Letting go of what I had more time for before my children might allow me to see what new things there are now in my life to embrace. I let go of the orange to embrace the tomato and then let go of the tomato to embrace the banana. I let go of all that me time to embrace the us time with my young children.

Living in season is a way of life. It is a life of mindfulness. A mindful living. It is a paying attention to what is here and now.

Seasonal living always comes up for me this time of year. All the images--stars, the Sun, birth, darkness and light--remind me that I am part of a greater season--a spirit season. I still have much to learn about my spirit season and what it looks like to live in this season, but I am learning. I am learning to spot what feeds my spirit (like the fresh banana that feeds my body) and what my spirit finds less than edible and out of season. I am learning to let go and to go without, trusting in the great circle, the great ebb and flow.

Living in my spirit season means taking time over the next 10 days to rest, to play, to journey to far places (if only in my mind's landscape), to allow time to pass freely, to feel bored, to connect deeply with others, to let go of old agreements and make room for new ones, to return to me.

Gatherers

My oldest son had declared that today was a pajama day. The sky was full of rain clouds so I understood his desire for a not-go-anywhere day. Today is a perfect day to read a book. But it being mid-August, I knew there was not much time left to pick raspberries. I piled my other two young children in the car, and as my son stood at the door in his fleece pajamas, waving goodbye to us, he quickly changed his mind. He wanted to come afterall. Throwing on clothes as fast as he could, searching for a book to bring with him (not sure where he thought he might read), he fumbled into the car.

When we arrived at the farm two miles down the road, my chilren bounced out of the car. Their eagerness to pick raspberries surprised me. It had been two years since we have gone to pick berries and I was happy to see they still carried some excitement.

We were all at home in the patch that morning. While my older two were way ahead of me and my 3 year old, I could hear their calls to each other: "oh, there are so many over here," or "look at this!" and "look what I found, look at all of these berries." I would spot them moving in and out between rows, managing to fit their small bodies under a supporting fence so they could catch the berries on the other side of the bush. I too had my responses: "there is a red one," or "look how many there are over there," and I would permit myself to taste one.

There is something magical about berry picking. Even though these bushes are cultivated, there is still a sense of the wild among the bushes. Something about this act of collecting a treasure from the earth and being able to place it in your mouth and taste its amazingly ripe flavour transports us to another time. A time when we were hunters and gatherers and lived off of what nature provided. We did not farm. We did not grow. We just collected the treasures to sustain us.

Usually my children and I collect raspberries for jam. This year, we each had our container to collect to eat. They taste different this year. Maybe this is the way they are to be eaten. Right from the bush, our small harvest in our hands, with smiles on our faces.