To everything there is a season, as they say, and if we don’t keep up with that we can find ourselves suddenly left out in the cold. The same is true with our inward seasons. Things don’t stay the same, even in our wonderful world of stillness. Stillness is not static … it’s the epitomy of movement. It’s the source of movement. “Turn” comes from the Latin tornare, which means to polish, fashion, or round off. By turning, we fulfill ourselves and embody the stillness that is us. Later meanings of the word turn emerged from the Latin: Old English turnian which means to rotate or revolve and Old French torner, which has the meaning also of drawing aside, change, transformation. Thus magicians could “turn a trick” or an alchemist could try to “turn lead into gold.” Isn’t that what we’re doing, as we go round and round the days, months, seasons, and years … yes, it may seem just a huge, unknown vortex that we’re being sucked into eventually, but couldn’t it also be seen as a polishing of our character and an integration of self? Sometimes when the darkening days seem particularly dismal, I imagine I am a lump of clay on a wheel, being fashioned into myself through the centering motion. I remember that in the turning point we reach the still point. We are continually enriched by the changing seasons of life. Let’s keep turning with them.
