Description
Seasons of Love is a call for integrity in a marriage. In this riveting memoir, the author confronts the challenges that befall her American self, her French husband, and their family. Seeing marriage as a daily “coming together,” their continuous courtship and commitment enable them to wake each morning, after sixty-six years, grateful for another day of loving.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Spring, Young Love
- One Sweet Kiss
- French Housewife
- More Babies
- Off to America
- Settling in Switzerland
- Summer, Love’s Growth
- The Priory
- Finding a Balance
- Looking Ahead
- Autumn, Love’s Harvest
- Reaping the Fruits
- Storm
- Settling Back Down
- Winter, Mature Love
- Baucis and Philemon
- Truth and Resilience
- Growing Old
- Celebrating
- Serenity
- Acknowledgements
- Index
- About the Author
Praise for Seasons of Love, Susan Marquardt Tiberghien
Reading Seasons of Love feels to me like being invited into a living prayer, the witness of two beloved companions across sixty-six years, bowing down ‘before the uniqueness of the other.’ Here the unfolding chapters of an unlikely and beautiful partnership merge fluidly with the rhythms and revelations of nature’s own Art and Beauty. Beginning with a breathless kiss among a riot of azalea blossoms, Susan and Pierre teach us how to see and to admire our loved ones more intentionally, not least in the tension of opposites that, without love’s tender embrace, might tear us asunder. Through it all, Susan’s luminous prose teaches me to listen for the hidden God in the dance of all things, in all seasons, as the rush of young love and the joy of raising a family yields to the anguish of terrible family secrets and the physical limitations of aging. It is finally the voice of Wisdom-Sophia that I hear in these pages, inviting me in my own marriage, in my own solitudes, to trust in the seasons of love. For after every winter, this very special love story assures us, “there will be spring.”
-Christopher Pramuk, Professor of Theology, Regis University, and author of Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton
For all who have struggled with the problem of marriage, this is a testimony to the potential sustainability of a committed relationship. Today, many people choose not to put their foot into these challenging waters, preferring career and the single life over marriage and family. Are they missing an important opportunity for individuation? Susan Tiberghien argues the case for marriage as the testing ground for the human capacity to love through thick and thin. Her story is a daunting achievement both in the living and the telling of it.
-Murray Stein, Ph.D., author of The Mystery of Transformation
Susan Tiberghien at 90 unrolls the extraordinary tapestry of her long marriage. This elegant writer, showing us the richness of love’s power and shared commitment, opens up the challenges in growth. Readers will be left with a sense that love, like the earth, is full of endless surprises. And they will wonder if in their own lives, they could be more actively courageous in exploring the energies of partnership.
-Wallis Wilde Menozzi, Poet and Author of Silence and Silences
Susan Tiberghien’s Seasons of Love takes us along as she recounts the setting forth on the always fragile barque of marriage, the entrustment of one’s well-being with another. Her account reassures us that the venture is still worth the risk of caring for and being cared for by another, no matter what storms beset the voyage. At our last anniversary, a voyage now in its fifth decade, my wife gave me a card with one sentence printed on it: ‘Someday you’ll find this card in a drawer and we will still be in love.’ Tiberghien’s account, and that sentence from my deckmate, tell us that all the risk is necessary to arrive at the port-o’-call that fi rst set us in motion.
-James Hollis, Ph.D., Jungian Analyst and author
This book is an ode to love and to relationship across the different phases of the arc of life. Written with soul and with courage, you will discover how family secrets can be lifted, how compassion and tolerance can heal, how deep understanding and the belief in a force that carries us can help us overcome trauma and find lasting love. Susan is a gifted writer, having lived herself a transformational process, her writing invites the reader to open up and let fl ow in the light. With a poetic and sensitive voice, she is also giving sensible testimony of both the highs and lows of 60 years of marriage. Inspiring, candid, captivating. You will not lay down this book until you have read the last page.
-Kristina Schellinski, Jungian Analyst, Lecturer and Author of Individuation for Adult Replacement Children, Ways of Coming into Being
Susan Tiberghien invites us into her marriage with Pierre from their very first kiss among the azaleas through 66 years together and gives new meaning to the vows “for better or worse, richer or poorer and in sickness and in health.” Their marriage deepens through their immersion in two different cultures, anchored by their spirituality and the teachings of Carl G. Jung. Susan embraces the differences in their cultures as a way to harmonize the disparate elements of their psyches. She has the courage to reveal a family secret about sexual abuse and initiates a healing within the family for its blindness to the truth. She inspires us to trust that the seasons of marriage—“the cyclical and interconnected nature of life—bring serenity.” She approaches old age with an acknowledgement of the physical challenges aging brings yet grounded in the abiding love she and Pierre share. Reading Seasons of Love you will be seduced by Tiberghien’s words—poetic and inspiring—to experience the deeper meaning of love.
-Maureen Murdock, Ph.D. Author of The Heroine’s Journey and Mythmaking: Self Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir
Susan Marquardt set sail from the U.S. for France in 1955, little knowing what this voyage would become. In Seasons of Love, she beautifully chronicles her ensuing journey of life accompanied by the man who would become dearest friend, companion and spouse: Pierre-Yves Tiberghien. Family, careers and diverse entailments soon followed. Tiberghien’s clear insightful prose artfully weaves the fates and challenges they encountered, amplified by reflections from C.G. Jung, Thomas Merton, Rainer Maria Rilke. It is the inspiring story of a relationship that grows ever stronger through encounters with the vicissitudes of life: inevitable twists of fate, vulnerabilities, forgivenesses and, most of all, Love.
-Robert Hinshaw, Ph.D., Faculty, C.G. Jung Institute of Zürich, Publisher, Daimon Verlag
