Category Archives: Fall

After All, There Are Only Four Seasons . . .

30 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by in Autumn, Fall, Seasons

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

This morning before dawn I was outside. Venus was on the eastern horizon, but above that the sky was clouded over and I saw no other stars. It rained last night and the night before, and finally some of the late summer heat and humidity have been washed out of the atmosphere. A thrill of anticipation ran through me.

In the past few years I have done a number of informal polls about the seasons. In one I simply asked people to name the four seasons. It’s funny (to me at least) how often people do not name them in order. I care little for which season you begin with, but it does seem like they should be named in order. Another is asking people what to call the season between summer and winter: most Americans say fall, but I very much prefer autumn.

But the one thing I like to ask people about the most is their favorite season. All four seasons have their fans, but spring and autumn have the most–and autumn is hands-down the favorite season. I get it, it’s probably my favorite too, ergo the aforementioned thrill of anticipation.

There is a certain feeling we get when autumn comes on. It’s a nostalgia, almost a deja vu, full of ill-defined longing and bittersweet reminiscence. Autumn takes us to the place where we can sense the cyclical nature of life on earth more strongly than any other season, when we can feel life drawing in to its essence. But here’s the funny thing: this feeling, as far as I can tell, is universal among human beings. We all feel it, we all share it. And yet I have had so many people try to articulate the autumn feeling to me, as if I would not understand, as if I did not feel it too. The sense that the autumn feeling is particular to an individual is almost as universal as the feeling itself.

The seasons surround us as thoroughly as the ground and sky and wind and trees. They are a part of every life. We believe, fervently in some cases, that our responses to them are personal, unique, and idiosyncratic. But it would be next to impossible to have a reaction to any season that is in any way unique. After all, there are billions of us, and only four seasons.

I don’t know if it adds to or detracts from my appreciation of autumn’s sentimental rush to know that every person around me feels the same. I do like knowing that I am part of the human pageant and share much with my fellow creatures in time and space. But I also like to consider myself uniquely sensitive. I know I won’t have figured this out before autumn gives way to winter, nor spring to summer, and then we start again.

Living in the Seasons

13 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Autumn, Calendar, Dates, Fall, Gregorian Calendar, Nature, Seasons, Winter

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , ,

I had time yesterday morning to take a walk in the woods surrounding my house. My woods, as it were, since it’s all property we own. I trudged out in a direction I hadn’t been before, walking down a steep rocky slope, which was further rendered hazardous by the slippery carpet of fallen leaves. It was a beautiful autumn morning, partly cloudy, slight breeze, mild temperature, very calm and quiet out.

You walk for a while and then you sit on a rock and gaze out across a valley at the trees that are still glowing in their autumn colors, and then you turn your eyes to the ground right around you, where a dozen kinds of leaves make a tangled pattern of color and shape, and you wonder whether you should concentrate your gaze above or below. Where are the answers? Where are the better questions?

So it’s autumn (or fall, to most Americans). I mean, we’re in the midst of all the things that define autumn–trees in brilliant color, leaves falling everywhere, breezy cooling days of misty sunlight and cloudiness–though the temperature was predicted to drop last night and bring the first snow. Anyone who has read this blog more than a few times knows that I have a problem with the calendar, which was developed to number days in a defined year, but doesn’t do a good job of tracking much else. Each season starts weeks after all the things that define that season have been in place.

That’s why meteorologists have meteorological seasons, which start at the beginning of the months in which those seasons predominate, and people living their lives in the real world start calling it summer when it gets summery, winter when it gets wintery. When you do, there’s always some smarty-pants standing by to remind you that technically, it’s not autumn yet, not winter yet . . . not until such and such a date.

We have this system that insists that spring begins at the vernal equinox, or summer begins at the summer solstice. These traditions go way back to ancient times, when people celebrated solar phenomena as the agency of deities who controlled them, and thereby also controlled the seasons. But the only thing that happens at the summer solstice is the summer solstice: seasonal change is incremental, and always variable.

I stepped out this morning to find that the predawn sky was as clear as a new morning sky could be, and every constellation announced itself. It was cold, down in the twenties. So is it winter now? Of course not. By later this week we’ll have temperate autumn days again, and we’ll still be watching the leaves fall and going to see our kids play football at outdoor venues.

You look up to the canopy of trees overhead, and down to the underbrush at your feet, and you realize that the answers are all around. This is not your woods, even though you’re writing a monthly check to a mortgage company somewhere: this is nature, and it will go on doing what it does independent of your occasional treks out here to check up on it. Likewise the seasons will go on changing in response to a thousand factors, very few of which we can tally and none of which we can control.

What season is it? Wake up, look outside. You tell me. Just don’t expect your calendar to clue you in, even though the page for November carries the appropriate photograph. The days will not be pinned down, and the seasons will not be tacked to the wall. You can’t define them, you can only live them.

Dominion, Or Not

07 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Autumn, Fall, History, Mythology, Nature, Seasons, Weather

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Yesterday I was reading an article in Midwest Living magazine about all the things we love about Fall. The author noted wryly that every year about this time she hears the same thing: people lamenting that the trees are not as pretty this year as in past years. There was a late frost in spring, or drought conditions in summer and it affected the trees. And then suddenly, one day, we drive down the street and boom! There’s a brilliant display of autumn foliage, despite everything. Okay, we get it.

Life on our planet is divided into two kingdoms, the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, and everything living, with minimal exceptions such as fungi and bacteria, belong to one or the other. I have a friend who is a botanist and she has more than once emphasized to me the preeminence of the plant kingdom on earth. Compared to plants, the animals are johnny-come-latelies, after-thoughts. Popular mythologies like to speak of the cycles of life, the circles of being, but that is an oversimplification, and really only jollies us along in our inalienable membership in the junior kingdom.

The fact is that all of the animals could die off and plants would endure; but if plants go away, so do the animals. Sure, if there were no bees many plants would move towards extinction, but we tend to overemphasize the importance of those particular plants, since many of them are the ones we eat. And birds and grass eating mammals are responsible for spreading the seeds of various plants, but they have at best a minimal affect; some species might wane without their animal enablers, but in general, the world would continue greening and browning in tune with the seasons.

Our popular mythologies also like to talk about Man’s Dominion over the Animals. Much has been made of this in history by way of justifying hunting, meat-eating, mass slaughter of food animals and more. But the interesting thing is that, while dominion over the animals has been easy, what we have fought tooth and nail for is dominion over the plant kingdom.

What is a garden but a place where we exercise dominion over a small plot of land? And a field planted with a food crop is a larger version of that, an area where we not only sow and hope to raise a chosen plant, but in which we hope to prevent the incursion of all other plant life. It is a business fraught with headaches and setbacks, and such is the history of mankind ever since what anthropologists call the Neolithic Revolution began some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our homesteads, our villages, finally even our cities are places where we have worked, with different degrees of success, to push back the relentless onslaught of the plant kingdom. Weeds are the advance troops of the conqueror, fighting back against us on every front.

And, if you think about it, the seasons are an expression of the natural cycles of the plant kingdom. It is plants that brown and die back when the days begin to cool, awaiting the sun of springtime. Demeter, she who ruled the seasons, was goddess of grain, not herds. Most seasonal deities in history have been vegetation gods. Sure, there are some seemingly instinctual, seasonal animal behaviors, such as hibernation, but these are purely learned responses to what the plant kingdom is doing: there’s nothing to eat, so we might as well sleep.

I have always thought that everything on earth exists around us and we are just along for the ride. Looked at in this light, it seems even more so. Our pride and our chest thumping over dominion of the animal kingdom is small potatoes in the end, and we are still just following along while the plant kingdom dominates everything around us. And the annual autumn display? Those glorious, defiant bursts of gold and red and copper on every hillside? They’re just a showy reminder of who’s in charge. Yeah, we get it. You don’t have to brag about it.

In Which the Seasons Literally Change

23 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by in 4th of July, Autumn, Calendar, Change, climate, Fall, Mythology, Nature, Religion, Science, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , ,

My life in the country, for the first several months, was beset by a troubling literalness. Like I was living the pages of a Country Life calendar showing what to expect month by month. We saw a significant thaw towards the end of February. In early spring robins made their appearance with an almost pedantic regularity, and by late spring, does with fawns crept tenuously across the fields. Asparagus jumped up in April, and strawberries too. We ate radishes planted earlier than other crops, and harvested tender lettuce by the middle of May. Throughout the month of May we saw clouds of Mayflies, and I saw my first June bug–literally saw my first June bug–on June first. It’s like these creatures were being paraded out by a stage manager in response to the verses of a song. I almost expected fireworks to spontaneously generate on July 4th.

Then something funny happened. Summer came on, pretty much on cue. But it failed, and continued to fail, in heating up the way summer does. It rained and rained. As a matter of fact, we have only had the hoses out to water our lawn or garden once or twice this year, and everything is as green and ripe as can be. Now we are setting record low temperatures for late July. We have not turned on the air conditioning this week. This morning I am sitting on the porch while a slow drizzle wets the screens, and as the sun comes up, everything in the distance is a blur in thick fog.

People’s reactions to all of this are interesting. Those who claim to doubt the reality of climate change scoff and say, ‘so much for global warming!’–but of course we have seen many record high temperatures broken in the past ten years. This is the first time we have set record lows for a long time. Many people like the lower summer temperatures, but they regard it all warily: ‘We’re gonna pay for this, just wait and see.’

But having spent the past several months researching the myths and the deities who over time have been thought to control the seasons, my thoughts turn to other peoples in other times. What would people three thousand years ago, who counted on a long hot summer to provide bountiful harvests and good hunts to fill larders for the winter months, have thought of all this? What happens if Persephone leaves her mother and returns to assume her throne in the Underworld months too early? Why did it happen? Did we omit some crucial obeisance to Demeter? Did our ceremonies to resurrect Adonis not work?

To me, this is poetic speculation. I know that Canadian cool fronts have been making their way across the American Midwest in response to erratic shifts in the jet stream, and that this pattern will only hold for a while; that summer will return with all its fierce heat and humidity–that we will indeed pay for this. Writers and poets in modern times often evoke myths like Demeter and Persephone or Aphrodite and Adonis, but they are metaphors in their hands, images to enhance poetic vision. There was nothing metaphorical to the ancient people who believed these myths: the winter was quite literally caused by Persephone’s return to the Underworld, and spring by her return to her mother’s embrace. If the spring did not arrive on time, or if signs of an early end to summer were apparent, it was cause for worry. Not knowing the natural causes of meteorological changes, people worked out their own rites and rituals aimed at effecting the desired changes. One can only suppose they approached these rituals with all the fervency of true believers.

Someone (exactly who is still in question) once said that ‘everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.’ This is an ironical acknowledgement of what we knew by the late 19th century, that the weather is ruled by natural forces, that there is nothing you nor I nor any mythical agent can do to change it. The seasons change, they are not changed. We get what we get, even though we expect certain things at certain times, like the pages of a calendar: look it’s April, here are the showers! Look it’s May, here are the flowers!

Getting Used to It

20 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by in Autumn, Death, Fall, Nature, Seasons, Spring, Stoicism, Summer, Winter

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, ,

Yesterday Leah found a dead fawn on our driveway, at nearly the farthest point from the house. She was riding, and came down to the house to get me. I walked along beside her and we discussed the likelihood that someone coming to or leaving the house had struck the fawn with their car. The creature was tiny, scarcely larger than a small dog. There were no signs that it had been struck. Its fur, the lovely white-spotted fur of the newborn, was still slick in several places, as if its mother had not completed licking away the birth fluids. It only took a moment of looking around at the tall grass lining the drive to spot a large area where the grass was crushed and matted, indicating that the doe had struggled here to deliver her fawn. But what happened then is anybody’s guess.

The only sign of trauma on the dead animal was a bloodied muzzle, but that appeared to be more the work of an opportunistic scavenger than a predator. Black flies already swarmed the corpse. My instinct was to ascribe the death to natural causes.

‘It’s our property,’ Leah insisted, ‘we have to do something with it.’ We, meaning, of course, me. I picked it up by the hooves, so petite that all four fit in the grip of one hand. Its weight was minimal, but its head swung loosely as I walked, the flies swirling off in angry clouds around my legs. I walked into the deep grass, about fifty paces off the drive, and tossed the corpse under a juniper tree. Likely it will be food for some of the same predators who had already been at it.

This is, I’m guessing, the sort of thing I’m expected to get used to, living in the country. But I don’t know. I’m pretty old now, perhaps too old to become inured to the casual death of such a beautiful animal. Even this morning I still feel the small hooves in my hand, the sloshing dead weight swaying as I walked. I think its wrong to be indifferent about that.

We had some snowy days this past winter, after a few winters of very little snow. Figures, since deep snow was exactly what I dreaded most. I hadn’t made any provision for plowing snow; I don’t like to purchase expensive equipment before I’m sure it will be needed. We awoke one morning to find it impossible to get out of our drive and onto the road. The only results of shoveling like mad for a few hours were a sore back and a few insignificant, narrow paths in the snow. I think I’ll be needing that snow plow.

Here in late spring I find all of the areas of our property that are not still wooded covered in waist high grass. I have mowed out a large ‘lawn,’ but the rest is undisturbed. Having come so recently from the suburbs, I can’t escape the feeling that this is an encroachment, something I should, but will never be able to, control. I need to get used to the idea that in some places on earth, grass grows without the intervention of power mowers and weed eaters.

I’m sure I’ll have similar qualms in autumn, when the leaves in their stupendous abundance begin to fall. I’ll rake and blow them off of the sidewalks and the patio, back to some acceptable perimeter that defines our yard, and then spend hours glaring out windows at the piles, silently challenging them, inwardly troubling myself for not doing something about the leaves.

Each season out here presents something I’ll need to get used to, whether it’s the snow of winter, leaves of autumn, or summer’s stunning armadas of flying insects. All of these things I believe I can come to assimilate into my lifestyle, to put up with, or ignore, or deal with on some level, whether it’s with better equipment or a more stoic outlook.

But the cycles of life and death–especially when they materialize in the untimely death of a newborn animal–are something that will always mystify and sadden me, and that’s as it should be. This is what makes us human no matter where we are, whether we are in the most sterile suburb scrubbed of anything natural except Bradford Pear trees and banks of mulched geraniums, or deep in the wild, surrounded by uncontrollable vegetation. I know I should have buried the fawn. I just didn’t feel up to it, and now it’s too late.

Healing

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Agriculture, Anthropomorphism, Autumn, Change, Fall, Healing, History, Home, Nature, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , ,

I was rolling the trash can up our long gravel drive to the spot by the side of the winding two-lane road where the trash hauler will empty it. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, it was sunny and warm and it felt like spring had come.

I have moved a number of times in my life. I have lived in places which felt like home, and I have lived in places where I never found a sense of place or comfort. But what I believe is that you don’t feel like you are inhabiting a place until you pass from one season to the next there. Seasons can do that; as they change, we change, or we find our permanence now embedded in one place despite the change. That place, we hope, is home. But there is often something more important that we need, something that the seasons may be inadequate to deal with, and maybe this is what makes one place feel like home when others do not.

We moved here in November, and though it was unusually warm for that month, it was autumn; gray skies, bare trees, brown grass. The move was hard. We hired a moving company for one morning to handle large furniture items, but for the most part we packed our cars and made the twenty-five minute drive from Oakville to High Ridge many, many times over the next few weeks. We kidded ourselves that this saved money, despite the high cost of gasoline.

At the same time, at work, I was managing the move of the library from the temporary facility we set up a few years ago back to our renovated and expanded library building. It was a huge job, including the complete shutdown and cleaning of that temporary library. Both of these jobs happening in the same few weeks in November, after months and months spent anticipating and planning them, was as much my fault as anyone’s, I guess, though I still can’t see how it could have been avoided.

As soon as we opened the new library, I was beset by a series of complaints from an attorney who claimed to be a specialist in the ADA. She showered me on an almost daily basis with e-mails detailing the failures of our new building to meet specific rigorous requirements, and missed no opportunity to tell me in plain terms exactly how incompetent, or dim, or uncaring I was. Though I eventually contacted a local ADA consultant to advise me, and she found our building to be compliant with the law in most every aspect, I am still receiving these complaints, though at a diminished frequency.

In short, I have found that there are situations in which anyone can be worn down. No amount of energy, of optimism, of healthy eating and exercise and reciting self-help mantras can sustain your spirit through some trials. You can be broken, and the ways in which your spirit manifests itself can be silenced. For me, that is my ability–what I suppose is my ability–to express myself in writing. For anyone who has followed this blog for a while it is no secret that my posts have slowed down, and that what I have posted lately has been uninspired. I haven’t had an original thought, or at least been able to express one, in a long time.

Our seasons are typically, and perhaps too dogmatically defined. Spring is the season of rebirth, summer of growth, autumn of harvest and gathering in, winter of, if not death, then at least of rest. These are all functions of the natural year and of its technical descendant, the agricultural year. At one time most of humanity participated in farming, but in modern society few of us do: most of our activities can take place at almost any season, and we do little more than make costume changes from one season to the next. And yet we translate the changes in the natural cycle into human terms, as if we were all living in direct communion with nature. But what if our innermost need is not rebirth, growth, gathering in, or rest? What if what we really need is healing? Which season is for that?

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald noted that spring and autumn are ‘the two times of year when change seems possible.’ I have asked hundreds of people what is their favorite season, and it is usually spring or autumn–with the definite advantage going to autumn. If pressed for why they like autumn, most people cite something like the feeling of change, of starting over, of renewal. This is a little strange, since it’s spring when things in nature renew their cycles of growth. Spring is the time of rebirth, and it has come at last, but I feel like I am only being reborn in the same damaged vessel. Reborn is not necessarily repaired, and change, though possible, is not necessarily inevitable.

And so the anthropomorphism of the seasons breaks down: human life, in the end, is more complicated than the natural cycle. We may want our lives to follow this simple cycle of growth and harvest and rebirth, but we have added layers of complexity that the wisdom of nature does not encompass or comprehend. It offers us rebirth when we need healing; it offers us a shining season into which we carry our darkness. We know our lives are in balance when we can once again internalize the natural changes; but those changes can do little to provide that balance.

I deposited the trash can by the road, looked around at the shrubs and trees that line the roadside, all of them beginning to green and flower. I turned back and made my way down the gravel drive to my new home. One more week of leaving the trash behind me and moving hopefully towards something new. I appreciate that at least the weather is nicer, though I am ambivalent about what difference it makes.

The Winter that Won’t Go Away?

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in Anthropomorphism, Autumn, Christmas, climate, Easter, Fall, Halloween, History, Mythology, Nature, Ovid, Puritans, Religion, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Weather, Winter

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

Late March and we are still buried in snow here. A March snowfall is not unusual in the American Midwest, but it is usually an unexpected freak of a thing, coming after some lovely springlike days, covering banks of yellow and purple crocus and stands of glowing daffodils. This year we have had none of that. Rather we have had unrelenting cold and gray days and now two major snowfalls in March, this last setting the record for a one-day event.

All of which has led to many references by newscasters and local weather personalities to ‘the winter that just won’t quit’ or ‘the winter that won’t go away.’ It seems a fitting appellation, but I wonder if we know how much cultural perception there is in the idea of winter ‘going away?’ When the seasons change, does one season go away, to be replaced by the next? Actually, seasonal change is mostly incremental. Some people who study this say that it is all a continuum. Scientists, for instance, usually only speak of the extremes, winter and summer, cold and hot, with everything else just a passage between them. But as humans we have a need to segment large swaths of reality to make it more manageable to our limited and easily fooled powers of perception. Landscape, which is also a continuum, becomes forest and field, valley and hill, river and bank, and we are more comfortable seeing things that way.

One of the earliest trends in human culture was to not only strictly segment the seasons, but to personify, even deify them. An example of this comes in the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18).  In the story of Phaeton and his quest to prove that he is the child of the sun god Phoebus, Phaeton seeks out his father’s palace. There he sees many wonders, such as the Day, Month and Year all personified. And–

There, flower-crowned,

Stood Spring; and naked Summer, wreathed with stalks

of grain; and Autumn, stained with trodden grapes;

and glacial Winter, with his stiff white locks.

For a long time in the history of Western Civilization–particularly European history–the seasons were portrayed either as deities or as persons. Summer tended to be a married couple either tilling their fields or raising children. Autumn was almost always people involved in the harvest, usually of grain or grapes. In paintings, in home decor, on calendars, in poetry, and even in music, when artists and artisans wanted to show the seasons they were usually represented by these standard, anthropomorphic motifs.

This all changed in the New World, particularly in the United States, though nobody is sure why. Some think it’s because of our more intense natural seasons: winter is colder, summer is hotter, spring more gloriously beautiful, and autumn!–well, autumn in America is so thrilling in its multicolored glory that we had to have a second name for it: fall, which is a shortening of the archaic term ‘fall of the leaf.’ So our representations of the seasons have tended to depict natural scenes, not abstract deities or persons. But of course most of Europe is covered in deciduous trees which change color in autumn, and people from Greece to England see the natural changes in their own homelands as stark and varied. Another theory is that our Puritan forebears found the need to purge our national ethos of these vestiges of pagan religion. This goal has been less than successful, given Christmas and Easter observances that are imbued with multiple pagan symbols, and a Halloween which is little more than a pagan Celtic harvest celebration. But at least we have cleared the ancient deities out of our seasonal art and mythology.

This is kind of a shame. When we talk about a winter that won’t go away, it might be helpful for it to have a face, a stubborn old man with ‘stiff white locks’ who refuses to leave and make way for flower-crowned spring. If there’s anyone from that ancient pantheon who deserves the heave-ho right about now, it’s that guy.

Lessons of the Seasons

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in Autumn, College, Education, Fall, History, Horses, Ice Age, Nature, Seasons, Spring, St. Louis, Summer, Weather, Winter

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

My daughter hates living in the St. Louis area. It’s about the weather. Last week and up to two days ago, we had temperatures in the low seventies, even light jackets were barely required for comfort; today we will be lucky to see 32 degrees, there is a sharp wind and a threat of snow. It has been seesawing like this all winter long.

What my daughter says, echoing what you hear a lot of people say, is that she’d rather it just stay cold: at least that way you get used to it, you accept that you put on coat, hat and gloves before venturing out. It is winter, after all. Of course I believe most people are happy for the few days of warmth in the midst of the season. You get to turn off the heat for a day, wash the car, do a few outdoor chores without freezing your buns off. It’s just a drag when the cold returns so soon, and so completely.

My daughter’s problem is that she works outside, tending to the horses at a boarding stable. It’s always been a strange phenomenon to me, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours around stables and it seems that no matter how cold it is outside, it’s five degrees colder in the stable. It is her choice to be doing this work, and her choice to be doing it full time rather than attending college. She decided at the beginning of the fall semester that college was not part of the plan for her future, which includes riding in competitions on the A circuit (whatever that is), and owning her own top-ranked stable. How she will afford the investment in a top-ranked stable is a question she has perhaps not fully dealt with.

My wife was–and is still–distraught at our daughter’s plans, at her refusal to enter college. She was a straight A, honor roll, accelerated class student who finished high school in three years. A bright academic future clearly awaited her. But a man I know, an academic adviser of considerable experience, once told me that there is nothing more difficult than keeping a really bright student in school. I see this now, and I am willing to work within the parameters of reality, no matter how much it interferes with our plans.

There are many lessons to be learned that do not originate in the classroom. Working in a horse stable, shoveling manure and hauling hay bales and coaxing aged farm equipment to fire up on frigid mornings, will surely teach one in short order whether or not this is the best kind of life; or whether something more in keeping with your academic potential might clear a better path to the future. I understand the role of the seasons in this lesson.

Back in the glorious autumn, with moderate to cool temperatures and the beauty of fall trees all about, my daughter came home each evening full of spirit, jabbering endlessly about which horse owner did this, and which rider did that, and all the things she was learning from various seasoned horse people. Now, as winter grinds into its weary depths, she only complains. She is being taken advantage of by the stable managers, who are supposed to pitch in with the work, but increasingly let her do more and more of it. The horse owners are stupid and negligent. Nobody knows what they’re doing.

A long time ago, I tended a large vegetable garden with a good friend of mine and his father. One July afternoon, with temperatures hovering in the nineties and humidity near 100%, my friend’s father paused over a row he was weeding, and remarked that ‘the hoe doesn’t fit your hand in July like it does in April.’ Indeed. An activity that seems so gladsome and salubrious in the spring is only tiring in late summer. And an activity that seems to be teaching you all about equestrianism and stable management in autumn turns out to be only a rip-off in the cold, cold weeks of winter.

My daughter has begun to talk about signing up for classes, perhaps as early as this summer, just to get some general education requirements out of the way while she decides what she really wants to do. It may be horticulture. It may be architecture. I don’t care. I just want her to be happy. But I also know that this plan needs to be well along before the weather begins to break.  I have been around stables in the spring, when the hay is all fragrant, and the sunlight filters through the stalls, and the horses stamp and chuff, eager to be at pasture. It’s the sort of place and time that makes anyone think about quitting a desk job and going to work on the farm.

In anthropology and history, there is a debate about environmental determinism. This is the idea that humans living in more adverse environments, such as Ice Age Europe, advanced more quickly because climatic pressures necessitated the creation of technologies and methods for survival, like building warm shelters, sewing clothes, and drying and smoking meat to store against winter’s scarcity. This idea was long considered Eurocentric, if not downright racist, supporting an old fashioned view of history as largely the accomplishment of Western Civilization. But it has begun to reemerge, as researchers revisit the common sense of its basic tenets, and as it comes to be applied to areas aside from Ice Age Europe, such as China and the Andes Mountains.

I think you can call it what you like, I believe that climate and the seasons have always taught humans many lessons. Whether it’s culture writ large, or the things that one young woman needs to understand about life in general, they are still teaching us every day.

A New Year’s Revolution?

01 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by in Astronomy, Autumn, Calendar, Dates, Fall, Gregorian Calendar, History, Julian Calendar, Nature, New Year, Resolutions, Seasons, Spring, Summer, Winter

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Am I the only one who feels this sense that the New Year is not where it’s supposed to be? For most of us, here in a western nation, for all of our lives, January 1 has meant the New Year, new beginnings, a time for resolutions. But the simple fact is, nothing really begins on January 1. Nothing begins in January at all–it stands in the middle of the winter, not the month when astronomical or meteorological winter begins, and not the month when the thaw begins to set in. Just there in the middle.

This is all a matter of history. If you’ve never read about how the Calendar was developed, you should look it up. It’s quite an interesting and convoluted tale. It wasn’t easy getting it right, and as Leap Year should prove, it will never be truly ‘right.’

For our purposes, it’s important to know that the oldest Roman calendar counted only 300 days, leaving the months we know as January and February as a vague, undefined time spent waiting for the spring equinox. This was reformed by Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, creating a lunar year of 354 days, to which he added one more day, simply because Romans were superstitious about even numbers. Rome’s priests administered this clunky calendar and added intercalary months from time to time to keep the year somewhat on track with the passing seasons and the solstices and equinoxes. But like all priestly classes, they were highly politicized, and did things like lengthening the years of senators they liked and shortening the years of others.

By the time Julius Caesar came to power, the Roman year was a mess, and running months ahead of the actual seasons. Using a model developed by Sosigenes, an Alexandrian astronomer, he decreed the new calendar, which came to be known as the Julian calendar. It was a 365 day calendar, with one day added every fourth year. Sound familiar? But Caesar also changed the beginning of the year. January 1 brought the year closer to the winter solstice, which is good, but why not just put it at the solstice? It is also said that Caesar chose January for the beginning of the year in honor of Janus, the deity who blessed successful military endeavors. Whatever Caesar’s reasons, he was the man in charge, and so the year was set according to his wishes.

Centuries later, Pope Gregory was to once again reform the calendar, giving us what we call the Gregorian calendar, though his reform was minor by comparison to Caesar’s, and notably left the New Year date intact. I find it odd that, given the chance (and the power) to reform the calendar, a Christian pontiff would not try to remove some of its vestiges of paganism. Not that I really care about such things. I like the way the history of Western Civilization can almost be tracked by reference to the names of the months and the days of the week.

What I do care about is that every year we celebrate new beginnings on a date on which nothing really begins. In our technological, artificially sheltered society, there are very few places or times where our lives run in unison with the seasonal cycles. In a sense, there is no beginning of the year–it is a perpetual circle of change, of decline and rebirth, and we are just along for the ride. But it seems that if there is a basic human need to declare a date when the cycle is beginning, we could at least put it on a date when something in the natural year occurs. I would suggest the spring equinox, where many cultures do place their New Year. But another candidate might be the autumnal equinox, given that there is among human beings an almost universal feeling of things starting over when the autumn comes around.

Then maybe it might work better when people make resolutions to do new and important things with their lives. Quit smoking, or lose weight, or go back to school. Grand, salubrious intentions that mostly fall by the wayside in the bitter cold and storm time of January. January is a month that challenges our resolve just to keep going: it is scarcely a time for new resolutions. It is, simply put, the wrong month for the New Year.

I would entertain a motion to change it.

Everything in Context

01 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Autumn, Cell phones, Context, E-books, E-readers, Fall, Mindfulness, Nature, Seasons, Technology

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

I’m driving down the road and I see a woman with a baby stroller. She is staring at a little something in her hand, I can only suppose it is a telephone of some sort. She is probably reading a very important text message from a friend on her phone. Could be the tenth or twentieth very important message that she has received from that same friend today. Meanwhile I note that it is a beautiful autumn day, mild breeze, cool temperature, leaves of many colors and shapes scattered round the stroller where her infant lies, ignored.

The problem with much technology is that it takes us out of context. I wrote several months ago about running with earplugs pumping music into my head. In doing so, I missed things like birdsong and the whispering of breezes in the trees that line the road. I have never liked the idea of running on a treadmill. It’s tedious and artificial compared to actual running outdoors, where I get fresh air and experience the changes of the seasons. But carrying a little radio in my pocket and listening to music while I run removes me one step from the experience at hand.

I read an article yesterday about productivity at work. One of the techniques the productivity expert recommended was to leave your mobile phone or your Blackberry (he called it a ‘crackberry’) at home one day of the week. He suggested Saturday. I wonder how many people truly have to be advised to stop their constant communication with work during the weekend hours? What kind of life is it if you are always, more or less, ‘on call?’

But the thing is, it’s not just work. Increasingly, all of us, all the time, are on call. Almost everyone I know carries a telephone. They turn around and drive back home if they discover they’ve left for any outing, no matter how brief, without it. Then there’s social media, Facebook, Twitter, et al. The classic line in a postcard sent to friends or family, when someone is visiting a place remarkable for its scenery or architecture or just its climatic ambiance is ‘wish you were here.’ Now, we try to make them be here, in real time. We send tweets or post updates to Facebook saying, ‘I am hiking in the forest,’ or ‘I am walking on a beautiful starlit beach’–to which I want to respond, well, you were, but now you’re typing messages on your smart phone.

I am not the biggest fan of e-books, but I do read some. I use a Nook, a simple Nook that is only an e-reader. But already, people are starting to read on iPads and other devices that do many more things. People who really dislike e-books complain that they provide none of the tactile, almost sensual experience of holding a paper book and flipping pages. I understand the feeling, though I think I can get past it. What I can’t get past is the thought of diluting the intellectual and emotional experience of engaging with a text for an extended period because the device I am reading it on can also take me online to send messages, receive updates, and play games.

At work these days, I am in the middle of a project to build a new library. I attend weekly meetings with the general contractor, the architect and the construction manager. Each of these people sets a telephone on the table at the start of the meeting. They are courteous enough to turn off their ring tones, but you see them, during the course of the meeting, tapping its screen, checking on incoming messages, barely able to wait to get onto more important meetings than this one. I am the only person who is fully here, engaged only with what is happening in front of me.

We need to preserve context, which is a way of saying we need to try living in the moment we’re in. In my work and study about the seasons, I am always urging people to learn ways to live in the seasons, to observe the changes of the yearly cycle, to get out and experience them, even if only in small ways. It can enrich your life. It slows things down, makes it seem less like life is just zipping by in an endless round of work days and errands. But we are moving in the opposite direction. When we read, we are also somewhere else. When we talk with friends, we are also somewhere else. When we are working, eating a meal, watching a movie, grocery shopping, doing almost anything imaginable, we are also somewhere else. We are out of context in everything we do. How will we ever learn to experience nature in our daily lives, if we cannot even experience a conversation with a friend without it being diluted by technological intrusions?

And don’t think that I am unaware of the irony that as soon as I finish this post, I will post it to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, in addition to WordPress. When I say ‘we,’ I mean we. I’m working on it. I truly am.