There is no clock,
only the turning of seasons,
only the breathing of worlds.

Winter, a silent white that asks
to keep the fire inside alive.
Spring, a first green that whispers,
“step forward, let the thaw begin.”
Summer, a blaze that tests
how much light you can hold.
Autumn, an amber wind that urges
you to harvest what you have learned.

Can you see the landscape outside
with clarity,
if you are blind to the terrain within?
The river that splits the mountain
also splits the heart.
As the root holds the dark,
so the dark holds the root.
What arrays the stars above
arrays the seed within.
As within, so without.

But the deeper readiness is clarity:
do not reach for a coat
when the sun asks for your skin,
do not call the green field a desert
because you are afraid to walk it.
To act as if it is winter
when the air is thick with August
is to argue with the order
that governs all things.
The seed does not hurry the soil;
it opens in sequence, or it dies.
You cannot hurry the fruit
nor delay the fall.

There is a guide older than wanting,
not a voice, but a structure.
The same rhythm that lifts the tide
lifts the blood in your body.
The same balance that holds summer and winter
holds your joy and your grief
as reverberations of one living tone.
What rises must descend;
what descends shall rise again.
The fallow field is not dead,
it is remembering green.
The world outside is a mirror
polished by the world within.

The first step is a choice of path.
It is not the road you inherit,
but the one you dare to tread.
And in the space between the turning leaves,
when one door has closed
and the next has not yet opened,
stand still enough to hear it:

Can you let the season change you
before you try to change the season?

Knowing yourself
is tracing the source of the river
that feeds every tide.

To know The One
that moves the world,
first know Your One,
the inner compass
that never lies.