Season by the Sea: A Contemporary Book of Hours
40 Full-Color Pages
6×6 inches square
$12
From the Introduction:
The idea for this issue was planted in the fall of 2007. I rented a cottage on the Hood Canal for the winter months where I spent part of each week. It became a hermitage for me and the blessing of spending time there watching the tides rise and fall was a gift beyond words.
I have always loved the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours. For me they embody a sacred awareness of the seasons and qualities of each hour of the day. The way dawn differs in energy from evening and noon from the dark of night invites me to be fully present to each of these moments in time with their own gifts and blessings. These shifting energies are reflections of the broader cycles of sun and moon. The moon waxes and wanes, the sun’s location in the sky over the course of a year shifts so daylight hours expand and contract while the earth responds with the seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each season has its own gifts and questions to us. Other religious traditions also have fixed times of the day for prayer, usually at the hinges of the day — dawn, noon, dusk, and night— those times that seem to have a special quality to them that calls us to a new awareness.
One of my favorite books is Music of Silence by David Steindl-Rast. It is a poetic journey through the hours of the day, reflecting on each of them as particular seasons or qualities of time. My spiritual life is shaped largely by a deep love of the natural world and the gifts and questions the movement of yearly seasons offer to my own journey. The cycles of the sun and moon provide profound wisdom about the rise and fall of our own lives, the time to flourish and the time to release. The day offers a similar kind of wisdom if we move through it with intention and awareness of its rhythms. Each moment becomes a gift with its own wisdom.
I invite you to use this booklet as a tool for reflecting on the different seasons of the day and helping you to move through the Hours with a deeper awareness of the gifts they each bring to our spiritual journeys.
Blessings to you –Christine Valters Paintner
