Author: Don Wilson

Seasons Change

Please join us for Gay Spirit Visions’ Winter Meditation gathering, January 17-19, 2025, at The Mountain Retreat and Learning Center. During our time together, we will consider, meditate on, and share about two things – the seasons of earth and the metaphorical seasons of our lives – and how they both are changing.

Earth’s seasons have been until recently remarkably stable, predictable, and entirely accommodating with our expectations and trust, affording us a sense of safety, allowing the illusion of unchangeability. The seasons imbue cycles stamped deep in our biology, seeding cultural myth and tradition. They are catalyst for action, inspiration, and muse, feeding the metaphorical seasons of our lives a chord with which to tune our personal, even our spiritual, seasons.
 
Though the earth spools out this illusion just enough to keep us in its thrall, it is a dynamic home that has always experienced change. The seeming equilibrium through which all life on earth has emerged, thriven, and fallen has forever been subject to perturbations, moving us from one pseudo-equilibrium toward another one around which life gathers anew, favoring some lives and not others.

We are in the midst of significant change in earth’s climate, caused by us humans burning too much, leading to vast disruptions of biological, oceanic, and other earth cycles. Does anyone not remember what the seasons were like earlier in our lives and see, feel, and know in our bones how they have changed during our short lifetimes?

So rooted are we in earth’s seasons that we often experience and frame our own lives through the metaphor of the seasons – the spring of youth through the winter of later life. While we often feel a sense of certainty when we’re young, this is an illusion that dawns on us as we age. No matter where we are in this progression, we soon come to know that our personal life seasons are no more stable than earth’s recent changing climate. In fact, living brings with it increasing uncertainty as we move through spring, summer, fall, and into winter. We float in the sea of our life experiencing little equilibriums bounced by endless ripples – sometimes waves – of perturbations, conveying us ceaselessly forward into the unknown.

When we find earth’s climate or our personal life seasons between equilibriums, when perturbation happens, tumult ensues. It can be a chaotic time where competing forces vie toward some new set point around which a new equilibrium may form, albeit as susceptible to future change as before. The chaos places us literally between two worlds, at the threshold of a doorway to someplace new. There lies opportunity, a possibility to summon our personal, perhaps collective, self-determination.

The gay/queer community is no stranger to changing times. In response to perturbations impacting our community many among us became agents of change. Becoming sources of perturbation, adding our stone to the scales, we moved gay culture and American culture through tumult toward new and beneficial cultural, political, even spiritual set points. Assuming a prerogative to “walk between worlds,” our community has abundantly delivered messengers, visionaries, and movers. In those changeable times and through such turns of power, Gay Spirit Visions came to be.

Nature tends to urge its threads together. It’s a philosophical basis for much of our understanding of earth and our existence. If part of our identity – our physical, even our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual selves – is rooted in living on earth, then how could the seasons of our lives not be entwined with the seasons of earth? A way then reveals itself. ‘Who are we?’ at its core does not ask of us a static answer but points to a dynamic, fluid, and changeable thing that doesn’t push away but rides change when it comes to our life’s shore, regardless of the seasons we find ourselves living in.

Many questions arise along these twining threads.

• How do I experience the changes in earth’s seasons? In my life’s seasons?
• How do I feel about the changes?
• Do I mourn the loss of what once was – the deep snow in winter that now rarely visits, the nourishing sun and warmth of summer without withering extremes, or rains and winds gentler than I now know, the wonder, energy, freedom, and opportunity of youth?
• How have my senses of safety, trust, and faith been altered?
• How are the changes changing me? Changing our GSV community?
• Is there a connection – whether troubling and difficult or energizing and inspiring, or both – between the unexpected changes occurring in the earth’s seasons and the changes in my body?
• And how might I respond through my corporeal, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual selves to earth’s and my own changing seasons?

 These questions are the heart of this year’s Winter Meditation gathering. It is an invitation to feel our way and deepen into these questions. We will offer time and space, and meditative, physical, sensory, and emotional room, for whatever may come to the surface. In the dim light of winter, amid the warmth of our lodgings, common spaces, and those of us assembled, we will create safety. Come willing to contemplate with courage and share your thoughts, feelings, insights (luminous or dark), fears, and joys to mix in strange alchemy in the shared vessel of Gay Spirit Visions.

Financial assistance in the form of scholarships is available. Our commitment is that anyone who resonates with our mission and community, and who has the desire to attend, can join our gatherings. To that end, we offer scholarships through the Raven Wolfdancer Financial Assistance Fund. Please go to the Financial Assistance page on the Gay Spirit Visions website for more information about scholarships and for a link to the Gay Spirit Visions financial assistance application form. Please note that the financial assistance application submission deadline is Friday, January 10, 2025.

Note also that Gay Spirit Visions currently plans to follow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 guidelines in effect at the time of the gathering.
  
Registration is now open via the Gay Spirit Visions website, so please join us. Register early so that The Mountain will know how many cabins to warm up! Private rooms are available on a limited basis. The registration deadline for our gathering is Friday, January 10, 2025, at 5:00 p.m.ET.

Karma 
John Schendel 
GSV 2025 Winter Meditation Convener