This is the first in a set of three journal entry-starters. Find the introduction here.
JOURNALING TO PLAN I. How can you nourish your soul this season?
I used to plow through life, not noticing nature’s shifts. I prided myself on busyness, seldom slowing down to drink in simple joys. One January, when circumstances slowed me to a halt, I discovered that my soul needs quiet winter and lively summer like my body needs midnight and noon. Like every day has an evening and a morning, every year has an autumn and a spring. Gradually, I learned to align my family’s rhythm with creation’s rhythm:
IN SUMMER. Summer is an exhale. It is alive and fresh and buzzing and curious and free-spirited. It’s exploring barefoot then laying lazy in the grass. It’s lemonade and watermelon and Sunday drives and fossil hunting and porch sitting at sunset. It’s lightning bugs and dragonflies and mossy woods full of tree frog and cicada songs. Summer is long and loud and green all over. Before the end, energetic summer outdoes herself in critters and vines. Just before she is overrun, and we are overtired, cool winds come bringing grace along with them. That grace is called autumn.
IN AUTUMN. Summer’s grip on our hearts loosens as it gradually gives way to fall. Fall is a gathering in. It beckons us to wind down and turn inward to gently prepare ourselves for our annual rest. Fall is last hikes and oven mitts and a full library bin. It is fat pumpkins and hot cider and cinnamon brooms. It is soulful and hardy and savored and looked forward to all year long. Fall is a longing fulfilled- quiet, peaceful, restorative.
IN WINTER. Autumn is sealed up with wonderful Advent, when the soil sleeps and we step into our annual sabbath. Winter is wool socks, warm mugs and snow days. I love a cold wood floor under my feet on a dim winter morning. In winter, we long for fairy tales and yeasty smells and home fires and cuddling up under weighty blankets with coffee table art books. We cook slower and get out less and read more. Winter is a breathing in. Then, as winter melts into spring, a glad anticipation wells up and bursts open with the daffodils.
IN SPRING. Spring is an airing out of winter’s quilts. It is giddy anticipation, like waking up the morning of a big trip. We get adventurous in spring and want soil under our fingernails and day trips to watch orchards bloom and ponds wake up. It’s puddles and ducklings and yardwork and birdsong and tulips. In spring, we plant seeds, drink our coffee on the porch and dance to livelier tunes. Spring is renewal. It’s a too short frolic- a zealous slurping up of hope and joy.
Over time, I have embraced each season’s mood. The habit has given a beautiful rhythm to the years that I did not know I needed. When I spy a splash of red on a maple leaf or the first daffodils pushing up, I pause and prepare my heart for the next phase. Like Anne of Green Gables, delighted with a thousand simple joys all year long, I list the little things I am most excited about in my journal. In the words of Andrew Peterson, the practice “makes my tummy feel floopy and warm.”
Try it. Take some time to dream up and write down how you want to live out this season. Study your current rhythm then widen it and deepen it and love it more than you already do. You are writing to yourself, so there’s no need for eloquence.
Many people make bucket lists for each season. Do that. But go further. In a messy word map, jot down activities, foods, feelings and adjectives that describe what spring means to you. Include childhood memories and tales from stories you have loved and observations of nature. Throw it out fast in word splat phrases like “pink cherry trees, renewal, spring break, peach tea, tennis, nostalgia, honey ham, redbud muffins, gentle rain, Robert Frost…” Consider collecting words from family members too. Then, go deeper. Ask the inventor of the seasons what this season means to Him. Ask God what He intends for it to mean to you. Bask in the answer and write out a plan for how to let this season nourish your soul.
If you dream like this quarterly, you’ll gradually find an annual rhythm that will richly bless you and those around you.
P.S. Often, when you want to add something beautiful to your life, you also have to take something out. We will journal about that in the next entry starter.
