To Everything, There is a Season

Weall know it. Or at least feel it intuitively. That we are creatures of time, that time is change and change is entropy and without entropy, there would be no time. At least not for us. Still, we yearn for permanence despite all reason as we struggle to accept living with our own finitude and the finitude of those we love and care for. As each turn of the season adds a little more to our private library of loss. And yet it is our ability to make peace with the passage of time that determines our inner peace, (or the lack of it).

It is what Pete Seeger knew when he adapted, nearly verbatim, a passage from the Hebrew Bible — Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 — into the classic 1959 song “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season),” and Nina Simone sang her heart into it: But perhaps it was Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) who best described the profound changes the human body and soul go through looking through the lens of menopause, (euphemized as ‘change of life’) not only as a particular to the female body, but rather the universal experience of change and our bias against old age.

Wabsite