Lisa Thorpe

What is a life cycle?

As I worked on my art response this week I kept thinking about what is a life cycle?.  Typically, in song and poem the human life cycle is depicted as having one spring, one summer… in the winter of your life and so on.  As I pondered this notion I found myself with arms crossed and brows pinched, I refuse to think I’ll never burst out in the green leaf of new summer growth again! And I know for a fact I have experienced a winter so cold and so fallow I thought I would never flower again… but I did. So I’m thinking the songs have got it wrong.  What if we think about our life cycle in the same way as those old Gravenstein apple trees out in Gina’s orchard, who have enjoyed 130 springs blooming, 130 summers of bursting anew in green gowns, 130 autumns of bountiful bearing fruit, and a 130 winters to lay fallow, to rest, to wait.  What if we were to see our lives in such a way?  It takes me back to my first art post, thinking about life as a spiral, meeting challenges over and over from a new perspective.  Thinking about life in repeated seasons makes the fallow winters seem less frightening, more a time to embrace and rest in knowing that another burst will come full of flower and fragrance and an inexorable urgency to bear fruit.