“Be not just summer to my soul but the full four seasons,” a friend once said to me. The poetry sounds like part of a sonnet from a lover to his lady, though I’ve never found the source. It resonates in my whole being like a love song between the Divine Lover and my soul.

Summer

Summer was lush and green in Connecticut where I grew up, and at Nova Nada in Nova Scotia, Canada, where I lived for decades on the edge of a lake. But summer is harsh and dry in the Sonoran Desert around Tucson, Arizona where I live now, with temperatures over 100 degrees day after blistering day. The rains don’t come until mid-July, and then in violent monsoons thundering out of the Santa Catalina Mountains, sending torrents of water down the city streets and thirsty arroyos. Trailing four o’clocks or “windmills,” desert marigolds, and Arizona poppies burst into bloom. Saguaro cactus swell green with enough moisture to last the whole next year. Our relationship with God can be like that: we feel like a dry well, and our bucket comes up empty; then we feel inundated by a gushing river. At one point in her life, St. Teresa of Avila wrote: “My soul was left as though in a desert.” Later she felt almost drowned “by a great deal of rain. For the Lord waters the garden [of our soul] without any work on our part.” As the Hebrew prophet Isaiah said, “Waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.”

Autumn

English poet John Keats called autumn the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”  Both magical and melancholy, autumn flamed red and orange in the bittersweet berries of New England and the maples around the Nova Nada lake. In Colorado where I used to have a hermitage, aspen trees turned gold, tangerine at the higher elevations, rabbit brush and cottonwoods bright yellow along San Isabel Creek, which I crossed every morning on my walks. Mary Oliver’s poem “In Blackwater Woods” describes autumn as a season of trees “fragrant with cinnamon” and fulfillment and as the season of loss and letting go. What do we let go? Everything: the joys as well as sorrows of the year, the joys and sorrows of a lifetime. Fragrance, fruitfulness, fulfillment, harvest, dying flowers, falling leaves, letting go – all on behalf of new life.

Winter

“The best part of winter is snow falling,” wrote poet Donald Hall. “The best part of winter is sun on the snow…. The best part of winter is the full moon on snowfields.” In the Colorado wilderness where there was no light pollution, I could almost read by the brightness of full moon on the snow, which often looked blue to me, as it did in Nova Scotia. “Winter is the year’s pause,” Hall muses. Don’t we all need these quiet reflective pauses in our lives? “The mind of winter studies desolation’s purity, vigor, and strict beauty,” he says. Sounds like contemplative prayer in the desert – the snow desert, uniquely beautiful and different from, yet very like the sand desert. I love how we speak of the “dead” of winter. Everything around us not only looks dead, it is dead: bare trees, brown grasses, barren landscape, the iced-over waters of San Isabel Creek which no longer run and gurgle. (Oh, blessed winter silence!) The Colorado nights were so cold and long, it seemed as if the sun was dead, too. Yet, as we learn from the Passover mystery of Crucifixion-Resurrection in the life of Jesus, nothing is ever really dead. Winter is “sleeping energy,” like Jesus “sleeping” in the tomb until “the third day.”

Spring

Springtime is nature’s “third day,” nature’s Resurrection, and a mirror of our own. Sooner or later, one way or another, we all rise from the dead. The burgeoning green of springtime reflects our own growth and vitality. Like the land around us, we burst from the tomb of our winter as though emerging from a womb. Like San Isabel Creek, swollen with snowmelt, we spill beyond our boundaries, life overflowing, too big and strong to be contained. “May you be blessed forever and ever, my God, for within a moment you undo a soul and remake it,” sang St. Teresa. She frequently describes how well God “repays” us for every suffering. The soul, she says, “comes out of the crucible like gold, more refined and purified,” recognizing the divine within. The predominant color of spring outside my Colorado hermitage was not green but yellow green: the color of young cottonwood buds coming up the creek from the valley floor, the color of scurf peas, the first wildflowers. Outside my hermitage in Ireland, yellow gorse bushes spilled down the hill and smelled like ripe apricots. Like the daffodils of my childhood, the predominant color of spring in the Sonoran Desert is the yellow of Mexican poppy, brittlebush, fiddleneck, senna and paperflower:  the color of gold, like our souls coming out of the crucible of whatever winter, whatever loss and death we have endured. God is every season in our souls: summer, fall, winter, spring. May we live the four seasons fully, awake and aware, sensitive to the slightest nuance of divine love in both our outer landscape and the inner landscape of our souls.