Category Archives: History

Autumn

04 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by in Autumn, Change, History, Seasons

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This morning the radio announcer notes that it is September 1, autumn is around the corner, and invites us to stay tuned in all seasons. Yesterday I stood on a friend’s balcony during a cool rain shower, looked at trees just beginning to take on fall color, and thought about the coming season. It is late summer. In the evening the cicadas make a persistent trill from the trees, and darkness closes in a bit earlier every night.

Much of the earliest religious practice humans indulged in was aimed at ensuring seasonal change. Demeter and her daughter Kore—transformed into Persephone, the ‘bringer of death,’ after her underworld episode—are as ancient as any deity we know. Even before there was a Zeus, there was a Demeter, and it seems obvious that to early humans, tracking the orderly flow of the seasons was more important than any Olympian hierarchy.

Dumuzi, Adonis, Attis and many other ancient gods and demigods died and were resurrected in spring or summer rituals, making sure that one season of abundance would follow on another, that the gods would never leave us to starve in a world without sun, without life-giving water, without warmth—what the Norse would come to think of as Fimbulwinter, three years of unbroken severe winter that would precede Ragnarök, the end of the world. In time, humans have learned one important lesson: the seasons are going to change, one following on another, and you can’t stop them.

Most people who have lived where there are four defined seasons do not want to live where there are not. They may long to get away to Florida for a while in the depth of winter, but not to live there all year round. We don’t necessarily like the extremes, even if we do like the four seasons. And what we love most of all are the transitions.

Some climatologists and meteorologists don’t recognize spring and autumn, speaking only of winter and summer, with the other seasons being just transitions between them. And as I’ve noted before in this blog, when you ask people to name a favorite season, spring and autumn are the most popular, with autumn edging out spring in the contest, and summer and winter running far behind. When pressed for further definition most people will tell you something about the wonderful feeling of the first cool days after a long summer, or the first warm days after the cold of winter. It is the change we like, the transition from one thing to another.

We are restless beings. How else did small bands of early hunter-gatherers come to populate the entire globe? We are hungry for change. Summer may be nice, with its pools and barbecues, outdoor concerts and Shakespeare in the Park, pretty girls in sandals and sundresses, but after a while the heat is too much, we’re weary of living in air conditioning, we’ve harvested all the tomatoes and peppers we can eat, stew, can or foist on neighbors, and it’s time for a change.

Human societies worldwide have cherished the autumn for a long, long time. Of course there is its aspect as representing an end of life. In the old symbolic systems in Chinese painting, autumn scenes, especially birds flying away over bare trees, evoke death.

Maybe it’s our desire to fight this that there are more celebrations, traditions, and events in autumn than any other season. While the two major winter events, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, may eclipse any autumn festival for size or glamour, they pale against the sheer number of autumn’s special days. The beginning of school, of sports seasons, hunting seasons, theater seasons, symphony seasons, homecoming games, harvest festivals, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the list goes on and on, to the point that it’s surprising how much we get up to in the autumn—all against a backdrop of glorious, multicolored trees.

So bring on the autumn. Let’s dust off the football, carve the pumpkin, dig out Mom’s old recipe for cranberry relish, get our sweaters and coats dry-cleaned, plan our annual autumn color tour, check our seasons tickets for this, that, and the other. There may not be any ancient rituals aimed at bringing on the autumn, but in modern times, few seasons surpass it for traditional observances.

What Do You Know?

13 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Beekeeping, History, Prehistory, Seasons, Technology

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It has been very cold here in the Great American Midwest, limiting the tasks I can take care of outdoors, but I had a few things I really meant to get done today. One of those jobs was to check on my beehive. Because it has been so cold I wanted to make sure the bees are doing well. I found them all dead, every last one of them. The combs are holding neither honey nor brood, but thousands of huddled dead bees.

I had told my wife that I would burn the pruned blackberry canes. We have a lot of blackberries, and she has been working to prune the dead wood out over the past few weeks. My job is to gather them all up and burn them, not an easy task because they are so wickedly thorny. Nor did I have an easy time getting the fire going.

A few years ago, when my seasonal research had taken me deep into the study of our primitive ancestors, I began to wonder something, a very basic question that I asked of many friends and colleagues. Some had no answer for me, some did, and I found most people’s answers either unsatisfactory or clearly the result of not truly understanding the question.

If you were to awake and find yourself among a band of primitive humans, perhaps 20,000 years ago, how could you help them advance their culture? I’d ask people this and they’d say well, we have modern medicine, or we know all about computers or electricity or transportation. Yeah, sure, we know all about those things. But what do you actually know how to do?

I mean, I understand that making metal drove a lot of the development of civilizations, so much so that we name different periods in human history the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. But I haven’t got a clue about how to find ore or turn it into metal. It goes without saying that I’m not going to be starting my primitive friends down the path of using electrical appliances any time soon. Examples like this abound. Even if someone is an accomplished engineer, the ability to get something meaningful done depends largely on having useful materials at hand. In the end, I think any modern human would be terribly dependent on those nature savvy experienced hunter-gatherers to stay alive, and the things we could show them would be limited indeed.

The blackberry canes wouldn’t light. I started with a pile of leaves and dried grass, put some newspaper under it and lit it with a match. It took several matches to get a fire started, which burned out before much of the pile of canes caught on fire. I started it again using more leaves and grass, even adding several logs from the wood pile to increase the heat. I was at this a long time, until I had used my last match. That’s okay, there were lots of embers, and limitless dried grass and leaves. As I worked furiously to ignite a flame, I thought how easily almost any member of a primitive tribe, given glowing embers and so much dry tinder, could have gotten a fire going. It would likely be a job for toddlers. I kept looking back towards the house, wondering if I should just march down there and get another book of matches.

When I finally got a good fire going the blackberry canes burned down in about fifteen minutes. But I still find it humiliating that even something as simple as starting a fire can give me such fits. When I came inside I found it had taken me an hour longer than I thought to do this simple job.

There are plenty of books and endless Websites detailing the steps to take in keeping a healthy beehive. I have read a lot of those, and I thought I was taking most of the steps they advise. Clearly I missed something, and my colony paid the price. It’s hard to say, in the depressing depths of winter, whether this crushes my spirit or inspires me to keep working. But for now, this is my goal: to be good enough at something–anything!–that I might be more than just a drain on resources to my tribe.

Apollo Ascending

27 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in Apollo, Goddess Worship, History, Mythology, Nature, Seasons, Summer

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It seems incredible to most of us that people used to believe strange things about how the world works. For instance, the very idea that the sun was Apollo, dashing through the sky in his golden chariot, is unseemly and fantastical. I mean, does it in any way look like that? Do you see a handsome Greek god with a whip in his hand, urging his chargers on? No, I don’t either.

Then again, we are all so busy these days, how many of us would notice? We expect it to be light at certain times, dark at other times, with those times lengthening and shortening with the course of the seasons. If it’s dark when we drive home from work we turn on the car headlights. If it’s light, we don’t. That’s about the extent of our interaction with the sun.

I’ve never been good at photography, though it is an art form I very much appreciate. A while back I decided that I could practice enough to at least bring my skills up to rudimentary. So for a while I was stepping out every Sunday morning, before the rest of the family was awake, camera in hand, to find subjects longing to be immortalized in passable photos. I had noticed that sunrises over the barn and woods and pasture were picturesque, so I thought I’d capture one. This particular morning was already light, but the sun had not begun to clear the trees on the eastern horizon. I stood and waited. Then sat and waited. Then walked around the property, coming at it from different angles, waiting for the Brilliant Solar Orb, the Chariot of Apollo, to appear. It finally came up, and yes there were nice colors in the clouds, and sunbeams streaked across grasses and fence posts, but I didn’t get any good pictures. I just don’t know how to stage a photograph, how to frame the subject matter. 

But the one lesson the exercise left me with was that if we take the time, we can watch the sun move (yes, I know, watch the earth move relative to the sun). And I guess in times long ago, when people were closer to nature, when its patterns truly dictated so much of everyone’s daily lives, they could see things like a benevolent deity rolling out each morning to bring them the warmth of the sun. They saw the chariot racing through the sky. The Greek gods, like so many ‘pagan’ deities, shared this world with us, even if they did operate on a higher plane of existence. They were beside us, around us, tending to the many details of life and nature.

I can’t help but feel that something was lost when monotheism replaced the old religions. Lost was the sense of personal deities, of gods dedicated to the things that mattered most to this person or that person. Lost were all the great stories. In their place we got a simple formula: God–the one, omnipotent God–created everything and set it in motion. Done. Needless to say it was a strict, necessarily male God. So no more goddesses, sorry. We still have many holiday observances that evoke these old deities, which descend down to us through the ages from their worship, though we usually don’t acknowledge that fact. But there is still something missing in not being able to ask Persephone to arise from the Underworld and bring on the reluctant spring, to weep for Adonis and beseech his blessings on our summertime crops, or to cast a glance skyward and ask great Apollo to please becalm himself on this already too hot day.

It’s all in how we stage the shot, how we frame the subject matter. When my daughter was about seven or eight years old she began to ask me if Santa Claus was real. I answered her question with a question: Do you think Christmas would be more fun or less fun if there was no Santa Claus? Yeah, I know, a little too sophist for a second grader. But I hope you see my point. Any fool can ‘learn’ things, such as what really exists or doesn’t exist, and what are the true explanations for natural phenomena. It takes an open intelligence and a willing heart to see the universe in terms of daily wonder: and it takes a force of will, at least it does for me, to be that open and willing.

So to say that I understand and respect those who created the old myths understates what I feel about them. I envy them, I miss what they had, and I think that in a larger sense, the world may be missing it too. I may have given up on the camera, but I intend to keep watching for Apollo.

‘Season’

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Ecclesiastes, Etymology, Genesis, History, Meteorology, Seasons, Spring, Weather, Winter

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Yesterday was sunny and relatively mild–okay, 35° Fahrenheit, which is tolerable, given the cold we’ve seen all winter. Today we have snow, sleet and ice. It’s the kind of precipitation that could be a spring rain, except the temperature is too cold. It has been like this for weeks now, this painful birthing of spring, going on in a kind of cycle within a cycle. A few days of warmth and sunshine, birds singing, light breeze in the trees, and then BAM!–back to winter. Like an engine that hasn’t been used for too long and needs to clear the gunk out before it can get going, coughing, sputtering, revving up and dying again. One tires of writing about it, and surely people tire of reading about it. So one thinks of something different to write about, doesn’t one?

For years, as I have worked on The Varied God, I have made notes for a subject I’d like to address in the book, namely the exact origin of the word ‘season.’ Yes, I am an English major, and have a fascination with words and word origins. You may recall that my interest in the seasons began with my curiosity over the whole ‘fall’ or ‘autumn’ question, and why autumn is the only season that gets two names. As with most words in English, there are some interesting things about the word ‘season.’

It comes to English from the Old French word saison or seison, where it meant ‘a sowing,’ or ‘a planting.’ That word in turn descended from the Latin word sationem, which had a similar meaning, ‘time of sowing, seeding time.’ This time could be spring or autumn, depending on when grain crops are sown in various areas. The sense of a season being ‘seeding time’ is embedded in our language in other places.

One of the few verses of the Bible to speak of seasons comes just after Noah has found dry land. God promises that, ‘While the Earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.’ (Genesis, 8:22) In this formulation it would seem that ‘seedtime and harvest’ are synonyms for spring and autumn, except for recalling that ‘seedtime’ may be a more general reference to seasons, and that seedtime and harvest can both come more than once a year. The areas of Mesopotamia and the Levant where flood myths such as the story of Noah first arose have never been characterized by a distinctly four-season climatic regime.

Further, this quote comes from my King James Bible, which first edified English Protestants in the early years of the 17th century. There is evidence that at that time, the word ‘season’ was not commonly used to mean specific times of the year, and that a word such as ‘seedtime’ may have had the more exact meaning. The Bible’s most famous seasonally-based verses, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (To everything there is a season . . .), which I have discussed at length here, use the word ‘season’ to mean units of time, not climatic designations.

One of the more important documents in American history is William Bradford’s The History of Plimoth Colony. Bradford, leader of the pilgrims on the Mayflower, wrote this meticulous journal of their expedition as it was happening, from 1620 onwards. In Chapter IX of his book, during the sea voyage here, he writes, ‘After they had injoyed faire weather and winds for a season . . .’ There are two things to note about this. One is that he uses the word ‘season’ to mean a period of time, not ‘spring,’ or ‘winter.’ The other is that his language is generally archaic. With this in mind, scholars have long issued new editions of Bradford’s History, with the language updated. Here is the same quote from a 1948 ‘translation’: ‘After they had enjoyed fair winds and weather for some time . . .’

But as the Enlightenment progressed, certain things became more scientific. In 1780 Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria convened a group of meteorologists he charged with formalizing how weather and climate were studied. They decided that the meteorological seasons would be defined by temperature and designated as three-month periods beginning on the first day of the first month in which that season’s temperature pattern prevailed. Spring would run from March 1 to May 31, summer from June 1 to August 31. This group only met until 1795, but meteorologists still recognize these seasons, even though the run of mankind still designates the seasons by their more ancient, celestial markers of solstices and equinoxes. It seems that seasons defined by this more rigorous standard needed a term reserved just for them. While the word ‘season’ is still used occasionally to mean some unit of time other than a meteorological season, we now understand these to be exceptions.

The homonym ‘season,’ meaning to add savory ingredients to food, actually originates in the same Latin root, sationem, or a time of seeding. As it sat in Old French for several centuries, developing its various shades of meaning having to do with the passage of the natural year, the word took on an additional meaning of ‘to ripen,’ which of course includes adding flavor, and saison grew into the general term for adding flavor.

One more interesting note: the most famous musical work about the seasons, Antonio Vivaldi’s quartet of violin concerti known as The Four Seasons, is called, in Italian, Le Quattro Stagione. The term stagione, though it too means seasons, does not come from the same Latin root, but from the word meaning ‘stations,’ or divisions. It is a curiosity of language development that Italian, the language closest to Latin, would have found a different word to cover this phenomenon, while many European languages use descendants of sationem.

The freezing rain is falling as I wind up this essay. I am anxious for the engine to rev up at last and take us away from this season, to pull out of this station where we’ve been stuck for way too long now. Maybe by the next time I write I’ll have blissful things to say about spring. One hopes, doesn’t one?

 

 

Sleeping through It

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Depression, History, Rome, Seasons, Winter

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One of the oddities of the earliest Roman calendar, which according to legend was created by Romulus, is that it was a 300-day calendar, ten months of 30 days. It followed time roughly from March to December. This oddity is still enshrined in the fact that the last four months of our year have names that mean, more or less, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth even though they are the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth months. But the greater curiosity is that the time between December and March, what we now call January and February, was a murky, undefined time, an unlucky time spent waiting for March, when Romulus could again lead his people in war raids on neighboring tribes.

People who study our earliest ancestors, all those people we generally label ‘cavemen,’ note how likely it is that they spent the worst months of winter in virtual hibernation, huddling together with family bands in caves or other rough shelters, doing as little as possible so as to require little food. With the Romans in the time of Romulus we are not talking about the Rome of the Senate, the emperors, Tacitus and Cicero and all that. This was a primitive tribe of warriors just now carving out its territory on the Italian peninsula, not far removed from the earliest human practices. Viewed this way, perhaps it’s not so strange that they didn’t mark the months of deepest winter; the remarkable fact may be that they were learning to mark time during the rest of the year.

Last week we had a terrible winter storm–lots of snow, and the coldest temperatures around here in twenty-five years. People did not take it well. For instance, I am ‘the boss’ where I work, and as early as two days before the storm staff members were approaching me with fear in their eyes, breathlessly asking what we would do tomorrow and the next day and the next. We’ll go on, like we did last time it was this cold. Life will go on.

But even as I pleaded with employees, family members, and everyone else around me to be brave and take it like a man, I also wondered if we were meant to suffer through all this. Why can’t I just curl up in bed, read good books, drink coffee, get up once in a while to make a sandwich or get cookies, and wait until March?

It’s not like I need to make war on my neighbors–they seem like nice enough people. I don’t need more territory, and there is not much I am looking to conquer. I’m only a librarian. Can’t people read the books they have for a few months while I close the library until the sun is warmer and the rivers are running free again? Is it a mistake that we have set up for ourselves a life in which we must function at full capacity even when our foremost urge is to stay warm, nap and pack on enough calories to endure the months of winter? They say that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD, appropriately enough) is a mental condition, chronic weariness and depression through the dark months of winter. Maybe. Maybe it’s the right attitude, and the true insanity is forcing ourselves to continue working and striving through it all.

The Roman calendar was eventually revised to include all the months, and the Romans went on to be one of the greatest civilizations in history. Could they have done so if they had continued to relax and keep to themselves through January and February? History books talk a lot about the legacy of Rome. They don’t dwell so much on the curse of Rome. Is this the price we pay for inheriting the mantle of lords of the universe? Thanks a lot. I’m really tired.

The World’s Most Enduring Holiday Ritual

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Adonis, Chia Pets, History, Holidays, Mythology, Osiris, Seasons

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For thousands of years, from Lebanon to Cyprus and around the eastern Mediterranean, women heralded the coming of spring by creating Adonis gardens. They packed earth into shallow potsherds, seeded it with wheat, barley and herbs, and effectively over-watered it, so that the seeds sprouted too quickly, shot up, and died. Then, with great wailing and lamentation they cast their small gardens into rivers–in Aqfa in Lebanon it was always the Adonis River. In this way they memorialized the life and sudden death of Aphrodite’s beautiful lover Adonis, and they also sought to encourage a fecund and beneficent springtime.

For thousands of years in Egypt, from one end of the Nile to the other, people created Corn Osirises. These were small earthen effigies of Osiris which they seeded with grain and kept moist. Osiris being the god of the underworld, these effigies symbolized life born out of death, or the return of the Nile flood and the fertile season of planting. One of the most ancient of Egyptian deities, Osiris probably originated as a fertility god, but was transmogrified over time by the priestly class into an intercessor between the dead and the judges of the afterlife. Though the priestly Osiris cult focused on this role, to the people he never lost his association with agrarian concerns. Corn Orisises are found by the thousands in Egyptian tombs and graves.

Seeding something at a significant time of the year was such a long-lived ritual that it seems only natural that we would have antecedents of the practice in our modern holidays. After all, the evergreen tree at Christmas, Jack-o-lantern at Halloween, and painted egg at Easter are all symbols taken from older, ‘pagan’ observances. And indeed, it appears that there is something which is closely associated with the Adonis garden and Corn Osiris which makes its appearance every year, just as the winter holiday season comes around.

I saw yesterday a commercial for Chia Pets, my first this year. I usually mute commercials, so I missed the voice over chanting the trademark ‘Ch-ch-ch-chia’ theme. But there on the screen I saw the various models available to slather with the tiny seeds of Salvia hispanica, keep wet for two weeks, and watch the fun begin. Or not. I was given a Chia once a long time ago, and try though I might, I couldn’t get it to sprout. I think it’s kind of like a Tamigotchi pet. You can’t just walk away; you have to pay attention. In this regard it is even more like the old Adonis garden or Corn Osiris–it takes some commitment, it is much more meaningful than other cheap holiday gifts that you can pick up at Walgreen’s on the way to see someone you didn’t remember to buy a gift for.

Recognizing this traditional, almost pious legacy of the Chia Pet gives us new perspective on the whole Chia enterprise. A few years ago, when they brought out the Chia Obama to commemorate the first African-American president’s election, some saw it as disrespectful. But no, the exact opposite is likely truer–it verges on the idolatrous! Is Obama then up there with Osiris, with Adonis? Of course, the Chia Obama does not usually get buried in tombs, or cast into a river. Yes I know, given the recent frustration over the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act, that may change, but it is not meant to be treated that way.

There are Chia Simpsons, Chia Scooby-doos, even a Chia SpongeBob SquarePants. Any of these beloved cartoon characters, in their appeal to children, may now offer parents a chance to create teachable moments: did you know, you can tell your kids, that the Chia has ancestors reaching back to the time of the pyramids? How thrilled they will be to learn of the ancient practice of casting these effigies into streams! (But a word of caution is in order: the Chia Pet is not flushable under normal conditions.)

In these times of over-commercialization of holidays, when the message of Christmas itself gets lost in the hustle to make money, it is reassuring to know that some of the most ancient traditions endure. I for one wish to extend a note of gratitude to the people at California-based Joseph Enterprises, Inc. for their good sense and dedication in working to save a little part of the world’s cultural heritage; and I wish them much continued success in the marketing the Chia Pet in all its brilliant varieties.

Dominion, Or Not

07 Monday Oct 2013

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

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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.

Healing

24 Wednesday Apr 2013

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

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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

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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

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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.