Tag Archives: Seasons

Temperature

20 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by in Autumn, Seasons, Spring, Temperature, Weather

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One of the things that has arguably been made too easy with the advent of cell phones in everyone’s pocket is checking the temperature. Given the strange seasons we have had in the past few years, I have developed the habit of checking my phone app first thing every morning, usually hoping for warm days. Usually, I find that the temperature is exactly what the same app said it would be when I checked it before going to bed last night.

There are several things we look toward as indicators of the seasons—increasing or decreasing sunlight; conditions like rain, snow, or ice; phenological occurrences such as plants greening, flowers blooming, animal activity; and of course, temperature. Of these, temperature affects us the most. Our lives in the modern world change very little in response to seasonal change. The modern food industry delivers strawberries to us in January and squash in April, so we can cook whatever we want in any season. Rain, snow, or ice all must be pretty severe to alter our daily activities. The few things we do reliably with the change of seasons are to change our costumes and turn on heat or cooling in our abodes–both responses to temperature.

It’s funny when we finally have the first moderately cool day after a long, searing summer, and you see women out in their sweaters and scarves, even though the afternoon temperature climbs to 80°. Just can’t wait to break out the warm woolies. It’s the same when the winter yields to a few warm days, and people throng the streets in shorts and T-shirts. You see kids the next day and the next walking to school in brief outfits, even though the temperature has returned to freezing. Our clothes are a statement, not just of fashion, but of our belief in what season it has become.

We have a conflicted relationship with the temperature. We obsess about what the temperature is: thus, the repeated checking of phone apps, and hanging onto every word from a local TV weather personality. Thirty-two degrees is a breaking point for us—is it above or below freezing? But really, anything from 33° to 40° does not feel that much different than 32°. Beer is considered nice and cold at 42°. We complain about the heat until it’s cold enough to complain about the cold. Almost everyone’s favorite season is either spring or autumn, the seasons with the most clement temperatures, and we long for their coming. And then we stay inside anyway.

When I was a boy our parents, and all the parents in our neighborhood, would sit outside on pleasant evenings, talking and watching us kids rollick through the block. Walking down most suburban streets on spring evenings these days is like visiting a ghost town. We’re not out in it, we’re inside: a new season of our show is starting, there’s a new special on Netflix. I recently read the observation from a British author that Americans are odd in that they will heat their homes in winter to temperatures they’d never tolerate in summer, and cool their homes in summer to temperatures they’d never tolerate in winter. I think he’s right—I have been in some icy living rooms in midsummer, and in homes that felt like proof boxes in winter. I just don’t know if Americans are unique in this; most people in the developed world have good heating and cooling systems. Are we alone in being so wasteful, so unaware?

If this is a problem, I’d say the solution is the same as I always prescribe: get out in it. Don’t even check the temperature, just throw wide the windows and see how it feels. Stick your head out the door. Plan different things according to the seasons. Cook different things in spring than you would in autumn. The temperature is an important measure of weather, but it’s also an artificial one. What one person thinks is too hot to be out gardening or picnicking may be your ideal afternoon. What one person thinks is a bitter cold day may feel to you like the best time for a brisk walk. We are not all the same, even if scientific measures like the Fahrenheit scale try to establish some uniformity.

You don’t have to play that game.

Precision

09 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by in Equinoxes, Seasons, Solstices, Summer, Weather

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Running this morning, as I was turning around at my terminus in Cedar Hollow, it seemed to me I was making good time. It also seemed that my run was taking too long; I had other things I need to do this morning. It was a fairly cool and yet humid morning, not unusual for August. We have been taunted in the past few weeks by cooler days here and there, though there’s of course plenty of summer left. Already I am hearing people talk about the fall and its many pleasures. I have a sense that I’d like the summer to be over, as well as a sense that I have not enjoyed the summer enough—have not fished, or camped, or walked in parkland and forest enough. Where has the summer gone? Why won’t the summer go?

In a culture whose summer begins on a day called ‘midsummer’ and whose winter begins at ‘midwinter,’ I’m not sure my feelings are all that unusual. There is always in imprecision in how we define seasons, and in how we feel about them.

The universe is not precise. Despite theories about God as omnipotent watchmaker, the watch does not keep good time, and our timekeeping is a precise system laid over a frustratingly imprecise cosmos. Summer may run from June 21 to September 21, but summer weather runs for as long as it runs: some years, especially lately, it’s been up until mid-October. We gauge the beginnings of the seasons by the sun’s behavior—solstices and equinoxes—but it takes the sun a while to render the terrestrial changes that make for a new season. Given the panoply of other factors, such as wind and rain, that make our weather variable, our wishes for sudden changes in the season are not without foundation.

It’s going to be a hot one today, temperatures in the mid-90s and humid. I’m used to it, the problem is staying used to it, like a lingering backache or a headache that won’t go away. I am going on vacation next week, kind of the high point of my summer, and I am anticipating it with delight. Oh, how I wish the summer would end!

Aguas de Marco

30 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in Aguas de Marco, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Brazil, Elis Regina, March, Seasons

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Yesterday I was driving home in the rain, and on the radio I heard Susannah McCorkle’s recording of ‘The Waters of March.’ For months I have been working on the chapter of my book that deals with seasonal art, including seasonal songs, and I can’t believe that I almost overlooked this shining gem.

The song was composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim, who wrote both the music and lyrics, including Brazilian and English versions. If there was ever a song with music more perfectly wedded to words, I can’t think of it. The song is about the rainiest month in southern Brazil, when floods carry things along in their stream, and the impressionistic lyrics flow just as the music flows. Almost every line of the song begins with the word ‘ė,’ which means ‘it is.’

It’s the stick, it’s the rock, it’s the end of the road . . .

All these things flow by, and life moves on towards its end. But there is a hint of hope, as the only repeated refrain is:

It’s the waters of March closing summer

It’s the promise of life in your heart

Jobim is likely Brazil’s greatest songwriter. Most Americans know his work from the song ‘Girl from Ipanema,’ maybe Sinatra’s recording of ‘Dindi.’ But ‘Aguas de Marco’—‘The Waters of March’—is his greatest composition. It was once voted the best Brazilian song of all time by a panel of critics and journalists.

It has been recorded many times, in many languages. Baby Boomers may be familiar with a recording by Art Garfunkel on his 1975 solo album Breakaway, a sadly lame version that fails to capture the essential rhythm of the song. (Sorry Art, it’s just not your best work.) Brazilian critics believe the definitive version is the duet between Jobim himself and Brazilian singer Elis Regina, which is lovely.

But for me, the best recording is by the beautiful, fated Elis herself, done with minimal accompaniment of gently chorded piano, bass, and brushed snare drum. The simple instrumentation keeps the vocals front and center, with all those tantalizing Brazilian sibilants flowing across the listener’s senses, whether or not one understands the language. There is a video of this recording here: check it out if you want a real treat.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of ‘Aguas de Marco,’ from a seasonal point of view, is in the fact that Antonio Carlos Jobim wrote two sets of lyrics. In the Brazilian version, March is the rainiest month, the end of summer in southern Brazil, where Rio de Janeiro is located. This is the reversed seasonal pattern of the antipodes, as in Australia and New Zealand. Thus the lyrics about March closing summer and such.

In the English version, all this is changed. March is still rainy, but it is not ending summer, but bringing spring. Lines were added about ‘the promise of spring’ and more to indicate the opposite seasonal pattern. To my knowledge, this is one of the only instances in art—popular or otherwise—that takes this change into account. I mean, Irving Berlin didn’t write an alternate version of ‘White Christmas’ with the words ‘I’m dreaming of a sunny Christmas,’ nor did Sammy Cahn write ‘Let it Shine! Let it Shine! Let it Shine!’ so people in Australia could have songs appropriate to their summertime holiday. So let’s give credit to Jobim, who knew that his songs would be played in the U.S. and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, for making sure that the lyrics would be about something meaningful.

Dental Surgery

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Aging, Janus, Seasons, Youth

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I have a new dentist, a lovely twelve-year-old girl. Her dental assistant, Denise, is about the same age, give or take a year. When Denise was on vacation recently, she got her hair cut; she was tired of always putting it up because it’s so hot out so she just decided to whack it all off. My dentist thinks it’s super cute, really. This conversation took place between them while they were giving me a root canal and crown. It’s one thing that they get you in the chair, give you a shot to numb you, and then present you with a sheet full of disclaimers and cautions, asking you to sign it, approving the procedure you’re already in the middle of. But when they carry on this girlish chatter while the drill is digging ever deeper into your gums, it’s disconcerting to say the least.

Last night I was reading the novel Submission, by Michel Houellebecq. The story’s protagonist is a young man just finishing college who notes that ‘maturing is to some degree learning to lose our disdain for the generation we’ve been called upon to replace.’ I can see that. Reminds me of the old Mark Twain quote, ‘When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to 21 I was astonished at how much the the old man had learned in seven years.’ When I was young I was as bad a smart-aleck as has ever inhabited the planet. Later I saw how much my elders could have told me—tried to tell me—if I had only listened.

And now I am on the other side of the equation, the older person who sees everyone as too young for the roles they inhabit, too inexperienced to understand things fully. My young dentist, vendors who call on me at work looking like they just left the playground, insurance agents, financial advisors, everybody is so young! I am called upon to learn trust, to know that these people, while young, are educated, tested, ready to provide the services they advertise. I must lose my disdain for the generation that’s replacing me.

In art, the seasons are often used as a metaphor for human life, from the springtime of youth through the aging and death of autumn and winter. We move through them one stage at a time, always looking towards what comes next. But what you don’t realize until you get to an advanced age is how much you also look back. This is what separates the seasons from human life—looking back as much as looking forward. The Romans must have understood this when they created their god Janus, god of beginnings, whose name is inscribed in the month January. He was a two-faced deity, always looking forward and backward, because nothing ever happens—nothing meaningful, anyway—without both.

I purposely selected a woman dentist. I just don’t like a guy with his big hairy knuckles digging around in my mouth. I was, I am still surprised by how young she looks, how young everyone in her office looks. But my tooth feels fine now, she and her assistant did an excellent job, despite over-sharing about Denise’s hairstyle choices. Like most people, I dislike dental surgery, and it was a big step for me going in to get some things taken care of. It was also a big step, moving closer to trusting the younger generation.

Edna Gets Around

08 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by in Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poetry, Pulitzer Prizes, Seasons

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Sometimes I think we fall into using certain locutions, because they express our innate desire to be seen as sympathetic, or right-thinking. Sometimes, if we press further into the facts of the matter, those locutions turn out to be simply nonsensical. Here is my current example.

I have been reading American poetry that deals with the seasons: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Most poetry collections include an introduction that offers biographical and critical material, and puts the writer’s work into cultural or historical context. These same themes are also reworked when I visit Wikipedia or Britannica Online for further information. Of Edna St. Vincent Millay, one thing is said repeatedly—I believe I read it in three sources, if not four. ‘Millay won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, only the third woman to win the prize.’ Impressive, no? It is sad, I think, that we continue to count women’s accomplishments by which number each woman who achieves something can claim. Good for Edna to haul in one of those coveted Pulitzers, and only the third woman to do so!

Then I got curious. She won her Pulitzer in 1923. The Pulitzer Prizes were established in 1917. The prize for poetry is not given every year. By the time Millay got hers, there had been five winners: Sara Teasdale, Carl Sandburg, Margaret Widdemer, Edward Arlington Robinson, and Millay. Yes, she was ‘only the third woman to win,’ but at that point, women had dominated the award. Women would go on to do very well, with Amy Lowell, Leonora Speyer, Audrey Wurdemann, Marya Zaturenska, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, and many others winning. Over the years, men have won more, but it would be a challenge to come up with a female poet who has deserved a Pulitzer and not won.

I think it would serve as better history, and indeed give credit to women poets, if the sources on Edna St. Vincent Millay said, ‘Millay won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to do so in a field dominated up to that point by women.’

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was notoriously promiscuous, taking many lovers, a practice that persisted unabated after her marriage. She wrote the famous verse:

My candle burns at both ends,

It will not last the night.

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light.

The idea of a candle burning at both ends is often interpreted to mean that her lovers were both male and female. She had no children, and her biographers note that in her life she had two abortions—in a time when such procedures were terribly dangerous.

She wrote of all seasons, but in a life as unconventional as hers, she was never going to mimic the traditional themes of seasonal literature. In the poem ‘Spring’ she asks, ‘To what purpose, April, do you return again?’ She is unimpressed by the resurrection of life, and the thought that death is never final, because:

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs,

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

More stirring to her is the death of beauty, as exemplified by autumn. In ‘The Death of Autumn’ she writes that when the reeds die and grasses are fetched off by the wind, she feels the weight of the year in her heart.

I know that beauty must ail and die,

And will be born again,–but ah, to see

Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!

Oh Autumn! Autumn!—What is the Spring to me?

As with most poets, Millay concentrates on spring and autumn, but summer also seems to hold special meaning for her. In her poignant ‘Sonnet XXVII’ she writes:

I know I am but summer to your heart,

And not the full four seasons of the year . . .

And in the poem ‘Song,’ she writes of summer:

Gone, gone again is Summer the lovely,

Gone again on every side,

Lost again like a shining fish from the hand

Into the shadowy tide.

Biographers have theorized that Millay’s sense of loss at the passing of another summer is a reference to her own childlessness, another fertile season spent without fecundity. But as far as I can see, there is nothing in her life to indicate she ever longed to have children, and the evidence indicates she was fully capable.

Millay is another example of the fact that the seasons will always be seen as similes for the progress of human life, both its cyclicity and its impermanence. And when that life is unconventional, so is the poetry it produces.

 

 

Uncut Pages in Burroughs

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in John Burroughs, Nature Writing, Seasons, Uncut Pages

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Last night I was reading Winter Sunshine by John Burroughs. Recent editions of Burroughs’s original books are hard to come by: today we have mostly anthologies and collections of his hundreds of nature essays. This was a 1908 edition of Winter Sunshine, and in the midst of the essay ‘Autumn Tides’ I was much surprised to find two uncut pages.

Let me tell you, if you don’t know, about uncut pages. Books are printed and bound using large sheets called octavos, meaning that there are eight pages to a sheet. The sheet is printed and folded into a unit called a signature. The signatures are assembled into their proper order, then run through a finisher that cuts the edges so the pages are all separate. Sometimes, the cutter misses a few pages. Sometimes it misses many. In the old days, this was common, and one could encounter uncut pages with some regularity. A person who could read and write was likely to carry, or have handy a penknife, with which it was an easy operation to smoothly slice open the uncut pages. I have read entries in old journals about the pleasures of finding uncut pages, like unwrapping a gift, or opening a door into a new world.

I used my Swiss Army knife. I was being careful, since this was a library copy, borrowed through interlibrary loan from the Abbey Library in Conception, Missouri. As I continued through Burroughs’s wonderful musings about the changing seasons, I was struck by the fact that I was the first person reading this essay in this volume. Almost exactly one-hundred years, and never had anyone opened these pages. This is a loss: people should always be reading John Burroughs.

I have been reading and writing about the seasons on earth for more than fifteen years. In my ever-expanding book, I have written chapters about the science of the seasons, the measuring of the seasons with calendars, the mythology of the seasons, and the holidays based on the seasons. Now I am working on the chapter about music and literature of the seasons. This has led me to many of the great nature writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Millay, Muir, Teale, Borland, Beston, Dillard, and of course, Burroughs. Of these, I find Burroughs the very best.

His essay ‘A Sharp Lookout,’ from the book Signs and Seasons (which I am reading in an 1886 first edition, borrowed from Grinnell College Library) begins by noting that one need not travel the globe to see unique and interesting climatic features: if one will only be still and patient, and keep a sharp lookout, no matter where one lives, all the seasons will pass by in pageant, like new and strange countries. Burroughs’s writing is beautiful and deep, but the depth comes from close observation, not mystical thought. He is spiritual, but not superstitious. In ‘A Sharp Lookout’ he cautions against things like ascribing innate intelligence to trees, or the ability of animals to predict weather. He writes of finding a frog in hibernation in November, having made its hibernaculum beneath the thinnest layer of leaves, surely an indication of a mild winter ahead. But the sharp lookout must persist, and he found the ensuing winter to be long and unusually cold. He sought out his frog in spring and found it no worse for a bad choice of winter domicile.

In the essay ‘Phases of Farm Life,’ he relates the chores on a farm more closely to the seasons than any other writer, save perhaps Laura Ingalls Wilder. By midsummer hay-mowing time, ‘The men are in the meadows by half-past four, or five, and work an hour or two before breakfast.’ Sugar making comes during ‘. . . the equipoise of the season: the heat of the day fully balances the frost of the night.’ Interesting to note that when he writes of farm life, he uses the old, Biblical terms ‘seedtime and harvest’ instead of spring and autumn.

Reading Burroughs is like entering a wonderful world we are all too rapidly leaving behind. I am as moved by his paragraphs as I am by the sense that it is a lost world. The very thought that I can still cut pages and enter that world is as close to a spiritual experience as I am likely to have in this life.

Spring Calling–Are You There?

07 Monday May 2018

Posted by in Cell phones, Seasons, Spring

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Spring has come at long last to the Great American Midwest. The days are beautiful, breezes sunny and mild. Birds sing from every tree, vying for coveted nesting places, chasing one another joyously through the air. Down in the area I call Cypress Hollow, where I turn around on my morning run to head back home, two ducks have paired up. I watch eagerly, hopefully, for the appearance of their ducklings. Nobody can talk about anything except the weather. Okay, this being St. Louis, the weather and baseball—but then the two are closely tied to one another.

Here’s a thing I want to talk about. I am a librarian. Librarians, traditionally, have had a conflicted relationship with cell phones. We oversee places that are much better when they are quiet. Yes, we have long despised the stereotype of the shushing librarian, but the fact is, if we do not shush noisy people, other people will usually approach the desk to demand why not. This goes doubly for people using cell phones in libraries. Everyone rude enough to use a cell phone in a library believes they are keeping their conversation quiet, but there is simply no such thing as a quiet cell phone conversation. They are all, always and forever, disruptive to the general ambience, especially in a public library reading room, where ambience is our most precious commodity.

All this is by way of saying that I dislike the whole cell phone culture. It was a long time before I was forced to get one. I use mine regularly now, but not so regularly that I am seen walking about on public streets with the thing stuck in my ear, or my eyes glued to the screen, watching god knows what. I once said, and still believe, that there is only the thinnest line separating people who walk around talking on cell phones all the time and people who walk around talking to themselves.

So on a beautiful spring morning, when I am walking into the grocery store for something, and I pass a teenaged boy staring at his phone as if the ultimate answer were displayed there, I have the urge to shake him and say, ‘Look up! Listen! The sky is blue, the birds are singing, daffodils and tulips are blooming all around you.’ I don’t like to be too judgmental, the lad is wearing the uniform that indicates he works at the store, and is probably on a break. Maybe this is the only time he has in his busy morning to see if he has any messages. But somehow I doubt it.

I am troubled by young people growing ever more tied to their tiny, demanding devices. There are studies coming out all the time indicating that cell phone culture is detrimental to health, to attention span, to ability to perform well in school, and on and on. I was talking last night to a man who teaches art classes at a community college: he tries to get students to stay off their phones during class, but finds that they don’t because they can’t! They are truly addicted. My problem is that young people spend too much time focused on their phones rather than the nature around them.

Of course one of my major gripes with modern society is that we don’t spend enough time outdoors, we don’t cherish nature, we don’t watch the seasons come and go. But I find the problem growing worse with young people. How are they going to worry about whether earth’s climate is changing, and seek solutions to the problem, if they don’t even know what the climate is like now? But the problem could be even more pressing.

My friend asked me this morning about the meaning of ‘spring fever.’ Is it something to do with allergies? No, I explained, it is an expression indicating a longing for love and romance brought about by the warmer weather. Like in the Elvis Presley song ‘Spring Fever,’ a terrible song from the crummy movie ‘Girl Happy,’ with the wonderful lyrics:

The blossoms on the trees

Look at the honeybees . . .

Get up, get up, love is everywhere.

Love in springtime has been a motif of human existence since before we were recognizably human. Courtship and mating find their primetime when the sun grows warm and the days grow longer. But what will happen when young people no longer notice this? Can the species endure? There is cause for hope: there are always hormones, the other great fuse of courtship, and I have not read any reports noting a decline in them.

Someone should create an app that tells cell phone users when it is the first day of each season, maybe plays an excerpt from Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ and provides a list of things that are traditionally done in that season. I’d download that, even I sometimes get so busy that I miss the first day of spring or summer. Of course, I’d have to ask a young person how to download an app . . .

Leaves

24 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Climate Change, Morning, Seasons, Spring

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Leaves. I am finally seeing leaves sprouting on trees everywhere when I run in the morning. Clusters of pale catkins on the tree out my window. Tiny spikes peeking out of the cypress branches. Trees in the distance seen as more green than gray, even in the dim light of a cloudy morning. Spring has had a tortured birth this year, Persephone held back by her tyrant lover, Demeter sorrowing in clouds and rain and weeks of chilly days.

But it’s all over now, I feel confident in saying. No, I don’t. Not confident at all, because this is the third or fourth time since early March that a few warm days strung together have played us for a fool, and I would be dismayed, but not at all shocked, to see frost on the windshields by the weekend. The past few years have been like this in the Great American Midwest. It is perhaps too facile to note that our climate is changing. Will we ever return to normal weather patterns, or is it too late? Maybe we just need to accustom ourselves to new realities. It would worry me, the dire warnings from the science community and the evidence of my own eyes—but thank goodness we have conservative politicians to tell us otherwise.

A few years ago, when I left the ranch, I began the process of getting used to new realities. No more stepping out the front door in the morning to an overwhelming chorus of bird song, to watching sunrises over the barn and fog rolling in over the west pasture, whole herds of deer grazing and dozens of turkeys dancing in the rain. I live in the city now, and watch for other signs of morning. Yes, I see the sunrise, and hear bird song—these things still happen, albeit in ways less immediate, less abundant. As I run in the early morning, the dusk to dawn streetlights click off in turn, starting from the east and moving west. Morning has come. Crossing the Watson Road bridge, a starling flits past me, singing on the wing, as happy as a starling anywhere. At Shop ‘n Save the Budweiser truck backs into the loading dock, beeping loudly, and the Tastykake truck pulls out, drivers who rose long before dawn to get the day’s commerce underway. Traffic picks up, and I negotiate with inattentive drivers at each crossing. They don’t intend to even pause at stop signs, why would they yield to me?

It has taken stores longer than usual to lay in their supplies of bedding plants, of mulch, gypsum, topsoil, and manure. The huge parking lot ‘gardening centers’ are just now opening. I have no gardening to do, only three small pots with herbs in my window, but I still get that springtime feel, things quickening, springing to life, when I see a family loading the SUV with bags of fertilizer and trays of little marigolds and begonias, cucumber and tomato seedlings.

And today, this week really, I am finally seeing leaves on trees. Someone said to me a few days ago that if she had to, she would trade all the flowers in the world for all the trees, and I’d have to agree. They are the lords of the spring, of the summer. Yes, it is still a cloudy week, with not much sunshine predicted for days. But it is hard to be gloomy when everywhere are signs of life.

A Chilly Walk

18 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by in Seasons, Spring, Winter

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I went out for a walk this morning and did not dress warmly enough. It was about 7:30 and the sun was in evidence in the east; it was big and golden but emitting minimal warmth, and I was more than halfway through my walk before I stopped feeling the chill. It is mid-March now and one expects warmer days. Spring begins next week—another time when we wish the calendar had some actual power. It is only a figurehead timekeeper, and the seasons wander promiscuously over its weeks and months, doing as they damn well please.
I will be happy to see the spring come. Though it was a mild and variable winter, producing almost no measurable snow, it has lingered well past its welcome—even for those few among us who do throw out a welcome mat for the coldest season. It occurs to me that in the past several months some of my posts here have been dour and depressing. This is likely due to the overall national mood as much as anything, as well as the tiresome round of changes in my personal life.
But I also see the good in winter. The Celts saw the coming winter not as a dark time, but as a time of building light—a distinction without a difference to some, but a very different emotional perspective. Winter is the time when we reflect, take stock, and find ourselves. If your spirit does not grow strong in winter, you’re going to have a hard time the rest of the year. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet’s Garden:

And what, I ask you, is winter save sleep big with the dreams of all the other seasons?

As spring comes on, and I begin to look outside, breathe deep, look for greening leaves and budding flowers, I realize that I have not wasted the winter. It has been a time of producing things, of moving projects forward. It may be only in spring that those projects meet the world, but they were accomplished when the windows were frosty and the nights were long. For instance, I wrote this song, which I think is very good.
I also finished a chapter of my book, once called The Varied God but now called The Measure of the Year. I have worked on it for so long, and I can now see my way to the end of the project. There are two chapters left to write, plus an epilogue, and significant parts of those sections are already researched and outlined, so they should fall into place pretty easily. I know, that’s the coming season talking, but I like it. I am a willing sucker for the siren song of spring.
It was a chilly morning for a walk. No bikers and no runners passed me, only a few huddled figures walking to their jobs at Shop ‘n Save and the Dollar Tree. Even as I write this I am looking out the window at a gray and gusty morning, with little climatic indication of the changes I am so anticipating. But a while ago I saw a flicker scuttling up the tree out my window, busily pecking away in search of bugs, and I knew that some signs of spring are irrepressible.
Spring is coming, and only waiting for you and me to join it.

 

Darkness

22 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by in Darkness, Daylight Saving Time, Seasons, Sunlight

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This morning I stepped out to run after a sleepless night. A pingy frozen mist fell on streets two degrees too warm for it to freeze there. It hit my face as soon as I stepped out, and my feet slipped a bit on the wet pavement. Can’t run in this, I immediately decided. Then I took a breath and the cold air filled my lungs; I took a few steps and my muscles responded; something like a thrill ran through all of me, and I began to walk. By the time I got to the running path I was ready to burst out into long strides, it all felt so good. All of which is especially strange, because it was still dark.

I am still running in darkness. We wait and wait through the darkness of winter for the sun to return, to give us days that are light when we wake up and stay light as long as we care to be outside while the evening draws to a close, and then, sooner than expected, the days begin to shorten.

It has been a weird winter—that’s the word people tend to use most to describe it. Weirdly freezing during December, then jumping back and forth from very cold days to record-breaking warm days throughout January and February. But we accept the unreliability of heat or cold in the seasonal cycle. Some summers sear you with weeks of excessive heat and humidity; some winters keep you in the deep freeze for far too long. Then again, either season can be mild and pleasant.

But the cycle of darkness and light never changes. I suppose meteorologists have tables that can tell us the exact moment of sunrise a hundred years from now. I enjoy running when the sun is up, when drivers heedlessly speeding to their destinations can see me. Like most runners I have had many near collisions with inattentive motorists, though a truck has only hit me once.

The problem is that we do not change our schedules according to the seasons–and that means according to darkness or light. In the old days, maybe Farmer Jones got up at the crack of dawn to start his chores. Well, the crack of dawn is not a time on a clock, say 5 a.m. or 6 a.m., it gradually moves through the year. As the year progressed, someone who awoke at the crack of dawn gradually moved with it.

Once we started doing everything according to clocks, at set hours, that all changed. Now Farmer Jones awakes at 5 a.m., whether it’s dark or light then. When we realized what an artificial overlay timekeeping was to the natural order, we put in force our clumsiest time tracking device of all: Daylight Saving Time. At that point, Farmer Jones likely wanted to hang himself from the hayloft. I can think of nothing that happens in the yearly round of days and nights that more effectively disorients and confuses people.

My thoughts are different when I run in the dark. More about how hard I’m running, how hard it is to run, how my ragged breath claws at my chest, my legs ache ascending a hill. It’s not that bad, but it seems like it in the dark.

Daylight is the good time, darkness is the bad time. Darkness, when philosophers and sneak thieves prowl the night, when dastardly deeds are done, when the lonely stalk their rooms in desperation. We fight the oncoming dark. Jack O’ Lanterns, bonfires, candles, Christmas lights and more illumine our wintry evenings, at least for a while, until we give up, throw in the towel, and let January and February chill our souls. But by then the corner has been turned, the solstice passed, Sol Invictus, Apollo, the Son of God, or whatever ancient spirit appeals to you has returned. To me, prosaically enough, it’s just the sun.

I ran a good distance, though not as far as I was running before I got the flu in January. When I got home I was barely winded and felt very good, and sat down to write this. Finishing up, I look out, and a pale light, struggling through dense clouds, is brightening the window. It’s too cloudy to see much, but the bit of future I can read in the brightness tells me that soon, I’ll be running in the sunlight.