seasons of being

what nature teaches us about love in action

by dimple dhabalia

There is a bench on the banks of Lake Ontario where I go to be close to my ancestors.

My cousins and I dedicated it to our grandparents years ago — a small, quiet act of honoring their lives and ensuring there would always be a place in the world that would hold their memory long after they were gone. 

By the time we did, my grandmother was already gone. But I was fortunate to have sat on that bench with my grandfather. I have sat on it with my mother. And I have sat on it alone, after each of them passed on, in the hollow silence that follows a loss.

I took the photograph above on one of those visits.

I was struck by the tree — the way its roots sprawled across the shore, half on land and half in water, suspended between two worlds. It didn't look diminished by this. It looked like it had learned something the rest of us hadn't yet. How to belong to more than one place at once. How to be held by the earth and the water simultaneously. How to exist in the liminal space between — not lost, not resolved, just present.

I think of that tree often.

We live in a culture that wants grief — and joy, and wonder, and change — to move quickly and in a straight line with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes we send a card. A single gesture, sent once, for the most visible season of loss or celebration. Something to mark the moment and move on.

But nature shows us a different way of being.

A forest doesn't grieve on a schedule. When a tree falls, the surrounding ecosystem doesn't move on after a prescribed period of mourning. The mycelial networks keep sending nourishment. The canopy adjusts. The light that filters through the new gap changes everything around it — the plants that grow there, the creatures that shelter there, the quality of the air. The loss becomes part of the landscape. It doesn't disappear. It transforms.

This is what seasons allow for that a single gesture rarely can.

A season doesn't promise resolution or a particular path. Winter doesn't end because spring has decided it's time. Grief doesn't lift because enough days have passed. Joy doesn't arrive on a specific schedule. Wonder doesn't announce itself in advance. We move through these different seasons of being human the same way nature does — gradually, cyclically, sometimes returning to the same place we thought we'd left, finding it changed, finding ourselves changed, finding that the return itself is part of the process.

My grandparents' bench is a season I return to.

Each time I go, I am in a different place within myself. Sometimes I go in grief, and the tree at the water's edge feels like company. Sometimes I go in gratitude, and the same tree feels like a teacher. Sometimes I go in the strange, quiet joy that arrives in the presence of those we have loved and lost — that feeling of being close to someone who is no longer here, which is its own particular season, one that has no name but that anyone who has loved someone knows.

This is why love in action organizes itself around seasons.

Not because seasons are softer or more poetic than a single card sent once — but because they are more true. They honor the way we actually move through loss, through joy, through change, through the thresholds that alter us. They make room for return. They don't require arrival.

Each of our empathy card sets is part of a season — a sustained rhythm of care moving through life's most profound landscapes. Not just grief and loss, but joy and celebration, wonder and awe, endings and beginnings. Six cards, shared with one person over six months — not because any season lasts exactly six months, but because presence requires depth which requires time. Because an ordinary Tuesday three months after a loss is as worthy of witnessing as the day the loss arrived. Because joy, returned to again and again, deepens. Because wonder, sustained over time,  teaches us something new each time.

Like the tree at the water's edge — roots in the earth, roots in the water, suspended in the space between — we are always living in more than one season at once. Grief and gratitude. Loss and love. Endings that carry the seeds of new beginnings.

At love in action, we take our cues from nature — and honor every season of being human.