Friday Joy: The Heart Has Its Seasons
/It's time for another edition of Friday Joy!!
Something that brings me regular comfort and joy is a book called The Heart Has Its Seasons. I first discovered this book on a shelf in my parents' house - the original belongs to my mother, and was given to her by a cousin when she was 16 and a junior in high school. It was a gift with a purpose: to help my mom heal from her first broken heart.
I love this little book. It's a collection of black-and-white photographs, poetry, quotes, and Bible verses, all organized by a season of the heart: The Heart in Winter. The Heart in Springtime. The Heart in Summer. The Heart in Autumn. The pages are thick and dusty-glossy, in an early 1970s fashion of book design. I keep it in a drawer in my bedside table, and on nights that end particularly rough days, I'll take out this book and flip randomly to a page to read.
We're here--amazingly--on the tipping point of winter into spring, so here's what The Heart is experiencing in springtime:
"Spring is a time for the mind to expand, grow, burst its limits. The spirit hungers for information, knowledge, ideas. It wants to be educated--to be lead out of itself into new worlds of meaning and awareness. Spring is a time for listening as well as for speaking. Springtime can also be insecure and sometimes cruel. A sudden cold wind can blow the heart back into winter...Spring, a time for wild ideas and imagination, can become flooded over with rivers of words...The heart in springtime knows that there is no limit to its power, no boundaries to the workings of the Spirit. It is a time for prophets and poets, a time when the sacred begins to open its mysteries and to reveal its secrets. In springtime the heart learns to think."
Happy Friday Joy. Happy last few days of winter.