Savoring the Season: A Seasonal Examen
by Jasmine Bellamy
Stillpoint Executive Director
sebastian-enrique-unsplash.jpg
As I sit down to write, today marks the first day of fall.
At the beginning and end of every season, I have a spiritual practice of pausing to notice. Before rushing into what comes next, I take time to reflect on what has been.
How did I enter this season? What happened within me while I was living it? What gave me life? What surprised me? What did I learn? What am I carrying forward? What might I be ready to release?
I have come to believe that transitions deserve tending.
I learned this more deeply during the season when I was transitioning out of the marketplace. So much around me was changing that it was easy to focus on the external markers of transition. My wise spiritual director invited me to pay attention not only to the transition happening around me, but to the transition happening within me.
A transition is a movement from one state, place, subject, or condition to another. The circumstances of our lives may announce that something has changed long before we have noticed how the change is reshaping us.
That wisdom has stayed with me.
At the threshold of a new season, I try not only to notice what is changing around me. In the stillness, I take time to notice how I am changing, too.
Here in my hometown in New York, the signs of fall will soon become unmistakable. The hours of daylight are already getting shorter. The air will become cooler and crisper. Apple orchards will fill with people gathering what has ripened. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, green leaves will begin their magnificent transformation into shades of red, orange, gold, and brown.
Nature knows how to change with the seasons.
Howard Thurman often turned our attention toward the natural world and the relationship between its rhythms and our interior lives. We are part of creation, and yet somehow we can watch everything around us change while imagining that we remain the same.
As the world around us changes, something within us may be transitioning, too.
So, as summer gives way to fall, I invite you to join me in a seasonal examen.
How did you enter summer?
If you could describe the season in a word or phrase, what would it be?
What gave you life?
What challenged or surprised you?
What did you learn about yourself, about others, about Love?
What has ripened that you want to gather before you move on?
Who are you now that you were not at the beginning of the season?
What are you ready to release?
And as you notice your inner weather and listen for what your soul is longing for, is there a word or phrase that feels invitational as you enter fall?
My word is savor.
This summer, my spiritual practice was abiding. I wanted to remain present to my life rather than rush to define, resolve, or control what was unfolding. Somewhere along the way, I began to notice the fruit.
Savor feels like the invitation that follows abiding.
To taste what has already grown. To linger long enough to receive the goodness that is here. To gather the fruit of what has been cultivated and allow it to nourish me before moving on to whatever comes next.
Savoring, I am discovering, is its own kind of attention. It is enjoying a conversation without needing it to become anything else. Receiving something I have created as an audience rather than immediately considering how it could be improved. Honoring the rhythms of my body. Returning to small pleasures and treasured memories. Approaching the work before me with the joy of I get to rather than the weight of I have to.
Perhaps savoring is one way we honor the fruit of our becoming.
Abiding gives Love enough time to bear fruit. Then fall asks: Will we become still enough to taste it?
Stillpoint is tending a threshold, too.
Our fall cohorts are launching as we enter a season of discovery and deep listening across our community. We are listening to our inheritance while imagining something new. We are seeking to understand more deeply what has been entrusted to Stillpoint over these many years, what remains essential, what may be ready to be released, and what Love may be bringing forth.
Perhaps becoming is not always about doing more.
Sometimes becoming asks us to listen more deeply. To remember. To gather differently. To release what has completed its work. To make room for what is emerging.
This fall, some of that becoming is taking shape through new ways of gathering. We are creating opportunities for alumni to reconnect, imagining pilgrimage as an embodied spiritual practice, and cultivating opportunities for graduates to continue their formation long after a certificate has been received.
Because none of us graduates from becoming.
This October, we will also welcome William Paul Young, beloved author of The Shack, for a one-day virtual retreat, just as his new book, Return to the Shack: A Journey into Redemption, enters the world.
I am struck by that word: return.
Perhaps returning is another invitation of the season.
We return to familiar rhythms. As daylight grows shorter, we return indoors. We return to tables and gather around them. Sometimes we return to stories, questions, relationships, places, or parts of ourselves we thought we already understood, only to discover something new.
Because a return is never quite a repetition.
The one who returns has changed.
Soon the leaves will begin to fall. We will rake them into piles, gathering what the trees have released. The branches that were once full will become bare. Daylight will continue to diminish.
And none of this will mean that something has gone wrong.
It will mean the season has changed.
Not every change is easy. Some things we release willingly. Others we would have preferred to hold a little longer. Fall reminds us that grief and wonder can inhabit the same landscape. We can marvel at the beauty of what is changing even as we grieve what is passing away.
Perhaps this is why we need one another.
We gather the harvest.
We gather the leaves.
We gather around tables.
We gather what the previous season has taught us.
And we gather each other.
So before you hurry into fall, perhaps you might pause.
Take a walk. Pick an apple. Notice the changing light. Sit beneath a tree. Gather someone you love around a table. Give yourself permission to savor something without needing to turn it into anything else.
And listen.
What has ripened?
What are you being invited to savor?
What are you ready to release?
Where are you being invited to gather?
Who are you becoming in this season?
My word is savor.
What is yours?
Be Still. Belong. Become.
With gratitude for the journey,
Jasmine Bellamy
Executive Director
Jasmine Bellamy is the Executive Director of Stillpoint: The Center for Christian Spirituality and the founder of Love 101 Ministries and The LOVING Leader. A spiritual director and contemplative preacher, she is a doctoral candidate at Fuller Seminary, where her research centers on how love forms the inner life of leadership. She is a graduate of Stillpoint’s BIPOC Spiritual Journey Program and received her Certificate in Spiritual Direction through Liberated Together. Through her work, Jasmine integrates contemplative practice, spiritual formation, and leadership development to support individuals and communities in living and leading from love as a daily practice.