If you have read some of the previous posts here you will have gleaned the impression that I love autumn! This most delicious season of colour, of texture, of scent and cool mornings with Indian summer afternoons. Yesterday was yet another glorious autumn gift, added to the fact it was a day free from activity and so my friend, visiting from New Zealand, and I were able to have a long walk by the sea and then pull out two folding chairs to be still. The inhaling and exhaling of the sea, playful seals slapping at the water with their tails, gulls, herons, and crows wandering in their habitat here at the edge of the sea.
Seasons come and go within us and around us don't they. We cannot stop them though we may try to block them and find we have remained stuck somewhere in a season that no longer gives life. I have been pondering how the second half of our lives has to count. At least I want the second half of my life to count in the Kingdom purpose. I want to live it wildly and passionately, with the blend of voice and community and the contemplative, infused with the scent of freedom.
So when I read the following quote by Carl Jung "Stages of Life", it grabbed my attention:Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life? No, there are none. Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideas will serve as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning - for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie." pg 9 When the Heart Waits - Sue Monk Kidd
What is this afternoon of my life? Certainly for me it is a span of time where freedom has become the scent, the theme, and the humour blended with tears in my life, along with creativity being birthed, nurtured and named within my body, mind and heart. An unusual dichotomy of waiting and action, and the incomprehensible see-saw motion of it requires time in order to accept the reality of it.
Reading Sue Monk Kidd's words in When the Heart Waits have encapsulated many of my thoughts and questions. This morning these was Light from the Spirit as I read them: LIVE the question, God whispered. That was the moment that knowledge descended into my heart and I understood. Really understood. Crisis, change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping - they aren't voices simply of pain but also of creativity. And if we would only listen, we might hear such times beckoning us to a season of waiting, to the place of fertile emptiness.Page 13 When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd.
This second half, this autumn season, THIS season of waiting, of creativity, of birthing freedom - I simply inhale it deeper within and cradle the beauty of it, let it write within and wait and listen for what those words are, those words of life. I wait for the Spirit to speak in the language of life and love - and to be made in the image of the Giver of life and love.
"Every word I've spoken to you is a Spirit word, and so it is life-making."