BitterSweetLife

Seasons: a conduit for "sehnsucht" (inconsolable) longing?

I’ve wanted to write this post for months. What’s kept me from actually writing it, more than anything, is the elusive nature of what I really want to say. We all experience the seasons; we all know they inspire a variety of emotions. But why? It’s the Why that I want to get at, and which seems so difficult to approach.

Every time the seasons change I’m confronted by beauty, but not the type you forget in minutes, like a crisp snapshot, not the kind that entrances you for days, like a haunting melody, and then wears off. The beauty of the seasons seem, like the rarest writing, to “pierce like swords or burn like cold iron.” *

The seasons evoke feelings with no proximate cause. They pluck chords I never composed. Silvery hidden threads begin to vibrate, like strands of an ethereal web, and at their distal ends, something is shaken, something that is rarely touched…

Spring, dissolving ice, brings fragile hope; summer blazes, and for moments one feels that he could live forever; Fall distils the heat, and wistfulness comes on the wind; the final, icy expanse of winter crystallizes in a sense of searching, and yet, loss.

To state it differently:

As the world turns, varying distances from the sun create meteorological variety. Climates in each of the hemispheres react accordingly, resulting in yearly weather patterns. As we experience these changes, our personal “weather” changes as well.

And still, there’s the Why. How to explain the alignment of air and soul? How do climate and spirit coincide?

There’s a truth that hovers at the fringes of imagination, solid and inscrutable. I can’t see it in the dark, but that doesn’t keep me from stumbling over it every year, spring and summer, fall and winter, scuffing my contentment, knocking my settledness. Something whispers, Listen closely, before you get too old, and I sense that a colossal weight - of joy or sorrow - hangs in the balance.

The seasons probe a devastating secret, in C.S. Lewis' words, “the secret we cannot hide and tell, though we desire to do both...Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter…” (The Weight of Glory)

But “beauty” won’t suffice. Like many beautiful things, the seasons are merely a conduit, a hazy mirror. Stare at them too long, and the sweetness shrivels. One looks, at best, through them, to what lies behind. In the end, the seasons are guideposts for a journey.

For now, I'll leave it at that.

“…they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (Lewis)

* This from C.S. Lewis, commenting on J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy. Lewis is in all ways an authority on the mysterious longing for something higher, deeper, as yet unattainable -sehnsucht he calls it - an experience common to all.