“In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites. They are held together in the paradox of ‘hidden wholeness.'” (Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak)¹
Today, March 16, 2023, I celebrated my 48th birthday – the day a new life came into the world 48 years ago. It’s also the week of our church’s farewell celebration – celebrating 13 years of service and impact in the lives of people throughout Cambridge, Greater Boston, and the world (this area tends to be a stopping-off place for people from many different nations)
Life is like that. Where seeming opposites happen at the same time. Where death and life co-exist.
What Is Your Metaphor for Life?
The metaphors we choose for life often become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Recently, I’ve been reading Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak where he advocates for using seasons as a wise metaphor for the movement of life. Some say life is a game of chance. Others say life is like a battlefield. Palmer suggests “that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real” (96). Seasons don’t deny the struggles or joys but encourage us to “embrace it all – and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.”
My family and I have been watching a show on Discovery+ called, Alaskan Bush People. It’s a fascinating story of the Brown family, a family of 9 that grew up wild living in the Alaskan Bush. There is a lot we can learn from them. They are a close-knit family, don’t have phones or televisions, know what’s important, love each other well, have faith in God, and live simply. But like any family, they have their shortcomings. Every time something bad happens, they say, “It’s Brown luck again” meaning bad luck. Instead of embracing the metaphor of seasons and the joys and struggles that come with each season, they’ve chosen to tell themselves that the Browns have bad luck. It’s a narrative they tell themselves over and over and have come to believe.
I have my own negative narratives, and you do too. One of the ones I tell myself regularly is that when something goes wrong – whether in life, with family, or in leadership – it’s all my fault. The more I tell myself that the more I believe it. The reality is, I may have some fault in the things that go wrong for which I should acknowledge and take ownership, but it’s rarely if ever all my fault. Quite honestly, taking all the blame is a form of pride and arrogance. Thinking things are all my fault means I would have total control over the outcomes, when in reality, I only have control of my part in any given situation. And the narrative that we are in control can be a deceptive one.
We do well to choose our narratives and metaphors of life wisely.
According to Palmer, most of us in the West haven’t grown up in an agrarian society but a manufacturing one, and it has significantly shaped our narrative. We don’t “grow” our lives, we “make” them. It comes out in our everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make money, make a living, and make love. “We absorb our culture’s arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything.” Accepting the metaphor of seasons means we can “conspire but never control” life. But it runs into a direct conflict with the common narrative that insists, “against all evidence, we can make whatever kind of life we want, whenever we want it.”
This has caused us to believe we are always in charge, which if you’ve lived for long enough, you know to be an utter fabrication.
The Paradox of Seasons
It seems my season of life is shifting. Maybe yours is too. Embracing the “seasons of life” metaphor means that within every season there is both good and bad, death and life, joy and sorrow. It’s not either-or but both-and. Autumn is a great example. What do you primarily notice in the fall, life or death, beauty or sorrow?
The reality is, it’s both.
Autumn is a season of life and death with great beauty as well as decline. But while things are dying or going dormant for the winter, nature is also releasing and scattering the seeds that will bring new life in the spring.
In every season of death, the seeds of new life are being sown.
Let’s end where we began,
In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites. They are held together in the paradox of ‘hidden wholeness.’²
As you look at your life today, I hope you find strength, as I have, in embracing the paradox of the seasons as a metaphor for life.
What season do you find yourself in? What are the paradoxes and where can you find “hidden wholeness?”
*Photo by Takahiro Sakamoto on Unsplash
¹ Palmer, Parker. Let Your Life Speak, 99. “Hidden wholeness” is a term coined by Thomas Merton
² Ibid