The Eternal Return in Seasonal Cycles

Bhakti mythology is deeply cyclical: Krishna appears and disappears, the seasons turn, devotion deepens and breaks and deepens again. Grief is not a single journey with an endpoint but a spiral—we return to certain losses at different depths, in different seasons, with different understanding. The Eternal Return in Seasonal Cycles teaches us to expect and even welcome the return of grief rather than believing we should have moved past it. Spring arrives and we remember the person who loved gardens. A song reminds us of a particular sorrow we thought we had resolved. The anniversary approaches. Rather than interpreting these returns as failure or regression, we can see them as deepening spirals—we are meeting the same loss again, but we ourselves are changed; we bring new capacity, new understanding, new creative resource. In artistic practice, this cyclical view allows us to return to the same themes, images, or stories repeatedly across our work without feeling repetitive. Each return is a new exploration. Like Mirabai returning again and again to Krishna in her poems, we can circle our griefs creatively, each circle widening and deepening our understanding and expression.