I’m taking a deep creative dive this week: three days of the New Orleans Writing Marathon and then six days of training with Amherst Writers and Artists. Both of these activities are self- and writer-affirming.
It’s true. I wish I had embraced my inner writer when I was in my 20s. There’s even a part of me that wishes I had believed in myself enough to step away from academics and just write.
My biological and creative seasons are out of sync. Biologically, I’m in autumn, late autumn even, approaching winter. But my inner writer reminds me we just barely celebrated the first day of summer.
Seasons. This past week, one of our writing practice prompts was a Yoko Ono poem about seasons:
Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.
This is what I wrote as I sat with this poem and three other writers in a coffee shop.
Writing Practice at Coffee Joy
I’ve been thinking about seasons of life. I’m past some of my seasons and unlike the seasons of the planet, my life seasons don’t cycle back. Regrets? Sure. A few. But I’m mostly focused on what I might yet do.
Am I in the fall of my seasons? Early winter?
Reverence. Have reverence for the magic of mindset, intuition, and trust in my inner writer. I do feel reverent. But I’m also in an exuberant period, writing hundreds of words a day. Words not always works, but the words are practice to set myself free to write the works. I’m not in the exuberant summer, it’s just my flip flops from the summer, and there are no rules that say I can’t bring them with me into autumn.
But maybe I’m in the winter of it all, still wearing my summer sandals and exuberance, my autumn sweaters of reverence shielding my shoulders from age and cold. Perseverance of winter. That’s not so bad. Through the perseverance of winter I can get there, I can do things I still dream, throw my hail marys into the depths of the universe as the seasons shift, and before winter begins to look like the innocence of spring and I forget the names, the details, and how to spell my safe words.
Jabberwocky.
This could be winter already.
Jabberwocky.
Can I be safe here? Exercise the exuberance I didn’t embrace in summer? Can I take hold of some glint of innocence to light the way? Find peace in the reverence for all the seasons, for all the phases of my life?
I do feel at peace, and maybe that is key to perseverance. No frenzy or fretting. Peace of knowing I am. I am making mindful choices even when it feels like I don’t have a choice.
And we don’t, do we?
Winter comes.
We can’t stop it.
Some might think I waited too long to take a deep creative dive. But even winter can’t stop me writing.
©Pennie Nichols. All Rights Reserved. 2025
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