Summer
Whenever you read this, you will be in a season of nature and in a season of your own life. We tend to think of seasons as a time of change as living things inevitably transition from one state to another. Nature’s baton is handed from one season to the next and we tend to think of the first ‘runner’ as being ‘Spring’, the word coming from ‘springing time’ in the fourteenth century. By the sixteenth century, this was shortened to ‘Spring’ describing how plants come forth from the ground (the Latin being ‘ver’ or ‘tempus primum’ as in ‘first time’). This ‘baton of life’ is handed on to Summer which runs on at a more leisurely pace. If Spring could suggest the morning, then Summer well conveys a lazy long afternoon and the promise of harvest. What do you associate with a Summer’s day? Where are you in the seasons of life and the seasons of the soul?
- ‘Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time’ – John Lubbock