The spiritual ‘seasons’ are a rotten nuisance.
One is inevitably going to cycle through the season as the planet cycles through its seasons. No point in trying to stay put or stop the progression.
When one reaches summer, one discovers oneself quite able to live blithely in and even ‘of’ the world, with all of one’s spiritual activities running in the background like an automatic generator, fully integrated into the system, and producing leaves and flowers and fruit.
And then it gets cold and all your fruit fall off.
The only thing for it then is to go Full Immersion, become almost hermetic, wintrily entrapped in the frozen ground, still carrying on all of the external activities in the world but no longer ‘of’ the world, instead submerged fully in the rejuvenating powers of God, the whole of one’s consciousness contained in the anchoress’s cell, the engagement with the world only a facsimile of what it was, externally unchanged but with a thick layer of detachment: I’m out to lunch, simply dwelling under the shadow of the Almighty (Psalm 91:1) until the next phase is ready.
Sometimes the quarterly or twice-yearly inventory is written to the clock, but sometimes it’s written at the beginning of winter. When the tree looks dead, write it. You’ll write it much better then because you’ll be able to see what’s there. It will take ten to fifteen minutes, and within it will be contained what used to take months to produce.
Now that’s out of the way, you can get on with the serious business of simply dwelling under the shadow of the Almighty.
For the Hebraists amongst you, the verb for ‘dwell’ in Hebrew, ‘yitlonan’, is used in that form in only one other place in the Bible, in Job 39:28, to refer to the dwelling of a large bird of prey on the pinnacle of a rock.
This dwelling is not a cowering: it is the safe and legitimate perch of a powerful creature, above the fray, where no other bird can reach, from which it can see everything that is going on without being affected.