In this episode, we explore how seasons are sometimes not as straightforward as they might at first seem
Over here, it’s midwinter. Which is why the blossoms are bursting out on the trees all over again.
Everywhere up and down the road I can hear the steady rumble of mowers, because the grass is growing like crazy too, while down in the forest it’s just a rolling, roiling carpet of green.
And yet it’s freezing out there. Literally freezing. Hard frost on the grass this morning.
Seasons are strange, sometimes…
Okay, yes, down in the city, it does look a bit more like a midwinter, with the deciduous trees all bare and that low-angle lighting and all. Sort of, anyway.
But those are imported trees, somewhat struggling to survive in a climate that’s very different from that where they evolved; and as you can see from those two images earlier above, that isn’t how the indigenous plants respond to these seasons. Down here, for the native flora and fauna, it’s more the summer that’s the hard-time, not the winter; this moment of midwinter is more a season of urgent regrowth and urgent activity before the winter turns properly cold.
And even for the northern winter, there’s that wonderful line from the ‘Little Gidding’ poem in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
Seasons are strange, sometimes…
In Anglo culture, and quite a few others too, we define our seasons not by the weather, but by a simple set of astronomical events, the path of the sun in the sky, from highest to lowest, giving us solstices and equinoxes that divide the year into four mostly-symmetrical parts. Yet this isn’t how even the temperature-range works, let alone the respective weather: in effect, each of those turning-points of the year is more like the start of the respective season rather than its midpoint.
More sensible people, perhaps, would instead describe their seasons more in terms of weather-patterns and the like, rather than by sun and stars. Down here in this part of south-east Australia, the local Dja Dja Wurrung people divide the year into six distinct seasons, some of them as short as a couple of weeks, with the boundaries between seasons marked by regular events that happen at roughly the same time each year. Even back in England, there are likewise all manner of mini-seasons in their own right. For example, there’s the relentless damp of ‘April showers’, just as spring is getting started; the sudden cold-patch in the middle of so-called ‘flaming June’ that’s blighted my mother’s birthday every year of her life; its counterpart in that ‘Indian Summer’ period in mid to late October that provides a brief return to warmth just as everything has started to cool down; the November grey that sends the temperature crashing down with its drizzerable cloudy days and crisp clear nights; and then that strange ‘midwinter spring’ described so well in Eliot’s poem. And then also all those micro-seasons, if perhaps more apocryphal than real, where it seems to pour with rain on every public holiday, with bright sunny weather either side…
Then we have those weather-events on longer time-scales, such as the el Niño Southern Oscillation, giving us alternating multi-year periods of El Niño and La Niña weather-patterns. Down here on this side of the Pacific we’re just coming to the end of a La Niña period, cold and wet; it’s likely to switch over this year to the El Niño side of the pattern, hot and dry, triggering drought and bushfires - not a happy thought with the forest just beyond the house noticeably marked by previous fires, and years’-worth of leaf-litter just waiting to explode into flames at the slightest touch. Scary indeed.
Or, to the other extreme, there was the ‘Little Ice Age’ either side of the northern Atlantic, that ran from around 1450 or so up to the early part of the 1800s - a long midwinter cold enough for the occasional Frost Fair on the Thames - but followed by the spectacular jump in global temperatures that started in the mid-1800s and has been climbing fast ever since. And volcanoes, of course, such as the 1815 eruption of Tambora that triggered a globally-devastating ‘Year Without A Summer’. Those seasons of climate-change are real - just not always the causes that we might expect.
The same could be said, I suppose, about seasons in sociopolitics and the like. Similar surges and wild oscillations; occasional summers, yes, but often long, cold winters of discontent, bringing misery to all. Sadly, we seem to be heading back into that kind of cold right now: a global surge of authoritarianism, as people freeze in fear of change, and are preyed upon by a bevy of self-styled ‘Great Leader’ types dishonest enough to sell simplistic wrong-answers to complex challenges, tell them only what they want to hear, and offer up some arbitrary scapegoat-‘Other’ as an easy target for abuse and blame. Oh well. Understandable enough under the circumstances, perhaps, but most definitely Not A Good Idea - especially not at this time when we most need to be able to get people to work together globally to tackle very-large-scale change.
So yeah, we do need to be ready for that kind of winter, however harsh it may be. Yet also not allow ourselves to get too lost in that fear - for we must likewise be ready for the spring and summer that should surely follow, once that midwinter moves on and fades away.
Thank you for sharing what I see as poetic, rational and a ray of hope for what would otherwise be another depressing day in the US. Cheers!