“The wheel keeps turning. There is winter, spring, summer, fall. And there are our interior seasons ”, observes the writer and editor Anne Ducrocq in the beautiful book she has just published by Editions de La Martinière, Our seasons. An inner metamorphosis. “Life, a path of initiation and change, is never still, we observe day and night, the years that pass. Our body, at the same rate as the Universe, changes and transforms itself. “
Through the exploration of the four seasons and their differences, this very poetic work, illustrated by numerous paintings and photographs, invites us to enter the circle of time and to embrace our interior seasons with wisdom.
You write that, like nature, with the seasons, we need thresholds and transitions to accomplish ourselves. What to say?
Anne Ducrocq. Everything appears, everything disappears. The seasons show us a path: that of tempo. We do not decide at what pace is going to mourn, whatever it is. But, as in a mountain climb, there are stopover lodges. You have to catch your breath and your strength. Likewise to let the life that wants to move forward in us ripen. Thresholds to cross or rungs of the ladder to climb, there will be initiation.
“There is a pedagogy of the season, it is the path of patience, of the small step”
We cannot evacuate the time of growth, because each stage prepares another state. If the fruit is picked at the wrong time, it will be too green or too ripe. We want to skip the steps even if it is impossible. There is therefore a pedagogy of the season, it is the path of patience, slowness, small step. But a part of us escapes this impermanence. The stars shine in the sky even when it is overcast.
The same goes for what I call our white, intact part of our being. It does not depend on what I have been done, or not done, said or not said, nor does it depend on my moods – always fluctuating -, my emotions or the seasons. It escapes everything and is soiled by nothing. It is the beyond at the bottom of ourselves.
Does this notion of metamorphosis find a particular echo at a time when time seems to freeze a little?
All of my books are about what helps me at some point in my life. The eminently spiritual theme of time has always interested me. When I thought about the vitality and complementarity of the seasons, their visible and invisible teachings, I knew I had a way of talking about our passage through time. Nature’s lessons are well worth psychology books. The seasons follow one another, in an unchanging rhythm, like man and creation, also follow rhythms, that of the tides and the moon, that of respiration and heartbeats …
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