Andrea Hayes, frequent author on environmental issues, introduces lessons of Springtime.
Spring is a delightful time in nature marking the end of the cold, dark winter and celebrating the return of light. It’s a hopeful season with new life emerging; snowdrops are often the first to bravely peep overground leading the way for other blooms to follow.
For me, this transition from darkness into light marks a gentle awakening of nature and is a reminder that despite whatever is going on in the world, the seasons keep moving along to a reassuringly regular beat. Experiencing nature’s familiar rhythms and learning from the predicable patterns of the natural world has for many years provided some of my biggest spiritual lessons. I always think the arrival of spring is the perfect time to plant new spiritual seeds which then become daily practices. Entering into the flow of the natural world has helped me become alert to the Divine rhythm in my spiritual life, with each season providing a new opportunity to deepen my relationship to God.
By following nature’s cues, we appreciate that it’s not only natural to rest, but it’s essential to take time in the dark, barren edges to retreat or hibernate before the light shines through. Sometimes we need to press the pause button, spending time alone and resting in stillness, actively awaiting God’s wake-up call. This can seem at first counter-intuitive in a world that seems to be always ‘switched on’. All too often we’re constantly busy in a state of do-ing and we too are always ‘on’. Sometimes there’s a subtle shift required to consciously move from a ‘human-doing’ to our more natural state of ‘human-being’.
To be fully receptive in awakening to God’s unconditional love, we must be in God and rest in the Divine. There’s a time and place for each of us to awaken to this special journey. Nature is a great reminder that we can too easily become multi-taskers, doing too many things. Perhaps just as nature hibernates and rests, we may give ourselves permission to rest in God, taking time to pray and ask God where and how we need to take a break in our own life.
Trusting the natural cycles of my own spiritual life has enabled great insights and opportunities to grow and ignite my spirit. Sometimes I feel the need to go into a ‘spiritual hibernation’, letting go of all expectations, resting simply in my faith and making space to receive. In order to truly awaken we must first take time to rest: this has been a crucial lesson for me. Trusting this spiritual slumber and knowing that like the certainty of the arrival of spring, God will provide my wake-up call and the perfect time for spiritual transformation and growth awaits me. But in order to fully bloom, one must detach from the busyness of the world, or – as nature reminds us in winter – to practise the art of pause. Creating a daily practice of pausing, allowing space to rest in a receptive state in order to receive the grace of God has been a pure gift. Like the transition from winter to spring, I become alive and alert to allowing the presence of God to bloom in my daily life, gently awakening to the fullness of my faith and my own spiritual spring. When you press pause with purpose you’re allowing yourself to be open and alert to “waking up” to God in every aspect of your life. The experience of “intimacy with God” is that sense of involvement that allows the fullness of our being to be in harmony with all of nature and the world.
The evolution of the seasons from winter to spring is as apt a metaphor as we’re likely to find for the journey inward. To find total attunment with the Divine, we have to be willing to engage in a reverse process – of undoing and resting. Could you take a cue from nature to practise this pause?