What We Gather After a Hard Season

My calendar was asking me to write a blog about the abundance of summer, all that I have harvested. The truth is, life isn’t always golden sunshine and bountiful harvests.

There are seasons in life when we are asked to carry more than we expected.

And with that a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from believing we are responsible for making everything better.

Sometimes we aren’t and we just can’t.

Sometimes all we can do is care deeply, bear witness, offer what we can, and then set the rest down.

The question then is not necessarily what we have achieved or accumulated this season, but what we have gathered along the way.

This summer has asked me to carry quite a lot

From parental illness to witnessing the pain and suffering of refugees forced from home in different places. I’ve had to let go of the need to control outcomes I cannot control, the weight of other people’s stories and the impulse to fix things that are far beyond my ability to fix.

There have been moments when the suffering in the world has felt almost impossible to hold. Moments when the stories of other people’s lives have stayed with me long after the conversation or the journey has ended.

I’ve had to learn the difference between honouring someone’s story and owning it.

We can bear witness without taking another person’s suffering into our own body as a weight we must somehow resolve.

In Montana, I found myself releasing some of that weight through my yoga practice. I cried a river into the yoga deck (yes it’s ok to cry during practice). I breathed. I moved.

And eventually I imagined simply setting it all down, allowing the earth to hold it.

At the sacred stupa, I left prayers for people I had met and for the suffering I had witnessed. I didn’t need to solve anything. I could offer my prayers and then release what was not mine to carry.

I began to notice what I had gathered:

Wisdom. Community. Quality time with people I love.

A deeper appreciation for the natural world and all that I have.

The generosity of people who have very little and yet somehow create abundance through hospitality and connection.

Perhaps this is another way of understanding harvest. Not simply gathering what we have grown, but noticing what life has given us. What remains, what has taken root, what we’ve learned and what we need to leave behind.

As we move into August, I’m sitting with the question:

What have you gathered after a harder season?

Not the things you have accumulated. The things that have become part of you.

For me that’s a little more wisdom, deeper friendships, a new perspective, a greater tenderness and a clearer sense of what matters.

Perhaps this week, before rushing towards whatever comes next, we might pause long enough to notice what is already here.

The harvest is not always something we can hold in our hands. Sometimes it is simply what we have become through what we have experienced.