Seasons
Item No. 12
“How can we specify how beautiful it is to experience the season's change?”How we think about seasons has everything to do with our earth’s pattern of rotation and its relationship with the sun. We translate the number of hours we see sunlight during the day (astrologically-speaking) and the weather (meteorologically-speaking) into our shared understanding of how things are at certain times of the year.
The calendar helps us track time passing as we complete this seasonal ‘circle game’ around the sun every year.
But a feeling is really how we know a season.
Our seasons all link to our human experience of life through nature. Seasons explain to us our embodied way of being with this planet.
Wet leaves on a pallid sidewalk? Late October. Autumn, obviously.
Purple crocus? Spring, no doubt.
When we think of a season, we know what to expect. What to prepare for.
Sunburn or frozen eyelashes.
Galoshes or our fisherman’s sweater.
Each season steadies our lives in subtle ways.
December, January, February? (The Hazy Shade of) Winter.
March, April, May? We’re ready for Spring. (Here Comes The Sun and The Rain.)
June, July, August? It’s Summertime. (Like Summer (of ‘69).)
September, October, November? Autumn arrives. (Harvest Moon and November Rain.)
(This is unless you’re in the opposite hemisphere and then everything is reversed, of course.)
There are other ways to think about seasons. Some think in terms of equinoxes and solstices.
Some think of a rainy season.
The Japanese have actually partitioned the concept of seasons even further into 72 seasons or kō, representing their perhaps more minuscule and nuanced (See Catalog entry: Nuance) way of grasping the changes in nature we experience throughout the year. Each micro-season in this calendar represents about five days. Each season a poetic description of how life happens around us and beneath our feet: “East wind melts the ice: February 4-8. Rainwater: February 19-23. Insects awaken: March 6-10.”
The week we publish this description in The Last Catalog, it will be when wheat grows under the snow December 31 -January 4.
Seasons appear in The Last Catalog, as the seasons appear to be shifting. Some say we’ve already experienced such a change: about 17 days already over the last half century. Others note new seasons emerging—a haze season?
It is possible that in the Northern Hemisphere the length and temperatures of seasons might change related to a changing climate. This could look like summer lengthening, with spring, autumn and winter shortening.
The data and debates that underpins all of this is one thing, how we experience it all, another completely.
How we plan for the year and what we expect to feel at certain times on that calendar, during certain months, is data of its own.
The seasons themselves might feel different, not only longer, but they might feel warmer, for example. What will it feel like when the hazy shades of winter get all mixed up with an earlier arrival of Here Comes the Sun?
Should our seasons quietly shift, what is the cost to us?
Ice. Ice melts in the sun.
Intervals we’ve always known. Periods of transition we expect to appear that don’t.
New kinds of hazy seasons.
Will the wheat still quietly grow under the snow? Will the insects awaken? Will the sun come when we expect the rain?
Should these cadences shift, how we are must quietly shift, too. In many places, cultural rituals, rituals, those events and practices that steady our lives, often relate directly to the seasonal changes. There are rituals to mark the beginning of spring, or the dark winter days. Celebrations or harvests, festivals, and other unique traditions hold our communities steady as we pass through the passing of the years.
Certain festivals with certain seasonal needs might need to change. Ice-festivals, for example, in warmer winter months. (It is hard to have an ice-festival without ice.) This translates to how we gather and what we gather for. This presents us with an opportunity to seek new experiences and symbols; and/or implores us to savor our seasons as they are and perhaps also to save them.
Other specifications:
How can we explain how beautiful it is to experience the season's change?
(Seasons).