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Sarah Lipton

Madeline Murray-Clasen

Living Seasonally

cherry blossoms

We live in a day and age where it is very easy to be disconnected from the seasons. The natural environment around us is calling out to us, inviting our recognition of the natural cycles and flow of energies.

It is up to us to listen.

Our society trains us away from feeling the wind on our cheek or noticing the power of seeds burgeoning forth from the soil. We have our smart phones with their thousand million apps and we can see where in the world it is sunny right now as if the rain falling on us were a hauntingly bad thing instead of a blessing for the earth’s growing things.

We live in environment-controlled buildings, get into temperature-controlled vehicles and drive through a world of asphalt and concrete to another protected environment – our office or school or other place of work. At the end of the day, we return by the same route and if we’re lucky we might take the dog out for a walk, but all the while, hooked up to our headphones and not listening to the songbirds or rustling breezes.

It is up to us to listen.

We live in this controlled environment so that we will not have to feel the world around us. We think we are protecting ourselves but in fact we are isolating ourselves from the natural world.

This harms us and it harms the world, for this disconnection is the source of our ignorance. When we ignore the interconnectedness of all things, we ignore the impact that we have on the world and the impact the world has on us.

If you are reading this, you are probably a bit curious about this, and curious as to how you could be more present with your own life, with things as they are.

So what if we learned how to engage that presence and tune in to the seasons?

What if we harnessed our natural, innate, instinctual connection with the world around us to gather our intention and focus our creative expression?

That is the inquiry of this journey. And I invite you to join me.