The Beauty of Both/And

I have been posting lately about my experience of the season we’re in here in the northern hemisphere—fall or autumn. As one of my friends reminded me, I have at least one follower who isn’t in this season. She lives in the southern hemisphere, and her experience is one of spring.

This hit me really hard. Or as my spiritual teachers would say, it shocked me awake.

First of all, it reminded me how easy it is to assume that my experience is everyone’s experience. It jolted me into remembering that there are so many factors that influence how another experiences life, in this case, geography. I had to bow my head in contrition, and acknowledge that my perspective had become self-referential in spite of my best intentions.

It also reminded me of another spiritual principle—the principle of both/and.

While I am experiencing the grief and letting go of the autumn season, others are feeling just as intensely, just a viscerally the gift of emerging from the hibernation of winter in the new growth of spring. While the leaves around me are dying, the buds are emerging in my friend’s world.

I felt my heart lift and my perspective widen. I felt in my cells the Truth that dying isn’t all there is, that not only will spring come to my world in six months, but it is, even now, emerging south of the equator. Death and rebirth are happening at the very same time on our planet.

I probably feel this with greater intensity because Autumn is my very least favourite season, and Spring is my absolute favourite. My friend’s reminder helped me feel in my body and my heart the co-existence of what I love and what I really don’t like at all.

Opposites are such beautiful teachers. When I let myself feel into the opposite of what I want to grow in my life, it makes my imagining of what I do want that much more vivid. When I’m caught in the grief of letting go, my soul is nourished by a bodily or imaginative experience of the emergence of new life. This is not a denial of the struggle or sorrow, but an allowing of what is, in all of its complexity.

Nature itself reminds us that no experience is ever any one thing. Fall is both letting go and gathering harvest. Spring is both releasing that which is frozen and allowing new life to emerge. Day and Night flow into one another in a cycle that repeats without interruption. The New Moon grows into the Full Moon which releases into another New Moon.

This is the rhythm of transition. There is always a part of it that we like, and a part we’d rather skip, and both are part of the whole. Nothing stays static. I meet my experiences with more gentleness and less resistance when I remember this rhythm, and that there is both dying and rebirth, darkness and light, heartache and wonder in every moment.