The Wisdom of the Seasons

Turn! Turn! Turn!

Music has always informed me.

I listened, as a very young child, to songs written by young adults struggling with the world in the 1960s and 1970s—songs that sometimes made me feel alienated and cold, like I was peeking into a room I didn’t belong in yet.

My parents left records out like shoes.

And just because they didn’t fit didn’t mean I didn’t try them on and walk around in them for hours and hours at a time.

And through my life, the wisdom in those albums has returned decades later as I—and all of us—begin to notice things that seem true as we age.

For me, wisdom is noticed primarily through music. I’m listening to a song I’ve heard a hundred times before, and the lyrics—or the movement of the music—will stun me into a recognition.

ReCognition.

I rethink. I remember. I know what this song is trying to say.

This doesn’t happen for me with the visual arts. I can’t look at a painting and have the secrets of the human condition revealed in the same way a song can. Music has moved me off entire paradigms I was convinced were true and into realms I have not lived, changing my view in an instant. It has allowed me to gain knowledge my own life could not have afforded me, if this song or that song had not entered my aural world.

Most wildly popular songs are about finding and losing love. But the songs of the 1960s through the 1980s are full of something else, too: the sacred, the divine, the dark night of the soul, the lessons learned only through deep suffering—and the understanding of mere mortals that never changes over thousands of years, even though we all secretly believe we are the first people to ever have deep thoughts and feelings.

“Turn! Turn! Turn!” is one of the songs I’ve heard a thousand times, and it still hits me how deeply philosophical it is.

Most people know it through The Byrds, whose 1965 recording turned an ancient text into a folk-rock anthem. But the lyrics themselves are much older. Nearly every line comes directly from Ecclesiastes—a piece of wisdom literature that has been circulating for thousands of years.

The passage begins simply:

To everything there is a season,

and a time to every purpose under heaven.

At first that sounds obvious. But most of us spend a surprising amount of our lives resisting the reality it names.

We want life to unfold according to our plans.

We want sunshine on a cloudy day.

We want the good times to roll.

We want the good dreams to go on forever.

We want growth without pain.

Love without grief.

Change without inconvenience.

Abundance without sacrifice.

But life has its own rhythm.

Life isn’t about continual comfort. In fact, it’s quite obviously about the sensations and perceptions that arise from an inability to stagnate.

The song names that motion through a series of contrasts:

A time to be born

A time to die

A time to plant

A time to reap

A time to build up

A time to break down

A time to laugh

A time to weep

What’s striking about these lines is that they don’t try to explain. They don’t ask for things to be different. There are no instructions for how life might be improved. The lines simply tell it like it is.

Existence moves in cycles. Endless change.

Day turns to night.

Winter turns to spring.

Youth turns to age.

And within those movements, our lives are unfolding.

Here’s the part I keep returning to: the turning belongs to something larger than our preferences.

We can participate in the seasons.

We can resist them.

We can flow with them.

We can learn from them.

But we cannot control them.

Listening to the song today adds another layer—especially in early performances like the beautiful video of Joan Baez and Pete Seeger singing it together when they were young.

Watching that now is a little uncanny.

The song reveals truth about time, but it has also traveled through time. The seasons it describes have passed over the singers, over the listeners, and over the world itself. Decades have turned. Centuries, too. Generations have come and gone.

And still the words fit.

The words, the feelings they evoke, the realizations they reveal—they have been turning through the seasons.

That is the wisdom at the heart of it.

Life isn’t a straight line of progress or control. It moves in rhythms: beginnings and endings, creation and destruction, laughter and grief. None of those movements are mistakes. They are the pattern of life itself.

Learning to recognize that pattern may be one of the first steps toward peace.

And once we see it, we can contemplate what we are resisting, exactly.

Because our time here turns pretty fast.

And if we spend that time resisting the very nature of existence, we miss it.

So maybe the practice is simple: notice the season we’re in, and stop arguing with the weather.

Something in us relaxes when we do.

Not because life gets easier—because we stop fighting what’s true.

If you’d like to hear the version I’m thinking of, here is that beautiful early performance of “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by Joan Baez and Pete Seeger:

https://youtu.be/n0xzyhoeu1Y?si=E_GbGXUppFLf1hCn

Hope to see you soon,

Andrea