The Art of Seasonal Living
If you take a peek outside, there will be some sort of indication of the current season. Perhaps fluffy snowflakes are gently falling to the ground, or young flower blossoms are beginning to bloom and beckon eager insects. Or maybe crunchy leaves are dancing on the current of the wind and whirling about your yard. Or, perhaps your garden beds are swollen with fat green leaves and crops ready to be harvested. Wherever you are in the world, and whatever your seasons may look like, change in nature is always astir.
While we experience the same six seasons of a life cycle that all life on earth undergoes, we don’t necessarily pay regard to adapting to the seasons within a single year like our cousins in the wild. Conception, birth, youth, adulthood, senescence, and death is the sequence all life endures. This is our shared commonality. These six life-seasons are what make up Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. In the plant world, all of these life cycle changes are jam-packed into a single year, which makes seasonal living an interesting study case for understanding how deep our connection with nature truly runs. Flora and fauna evolve and adapt to the ever-changing conditions, and it seems that us humans tend to dismiss or ignore the magical transformations that happen from one season to another.
Once upon a time, our species used to live so in sync with the rhythms of nature that the changing seasons shaped our daily habits, mindsets, lifestyles, and connections with the world around us. Reading nature's signs was part of our repertoire that helped us navigate wild landscapes with ease and understanding. There was a time when we better understood the complexities of nature’s workings and thought twice about taking a life, or digging too deeply for resources to meet our greed. Seasonal markers on the solar and lunar cycles were cause for celebration that crossed borders of culture, mysticism and spiritualism. Those philosophies and traditions were woven into the stories of the human experience that was once shared between tribes over gatherings around the fire.
We know this because of the seasonal celebrations and folkloric stories surrounding the equinox, solstice, monthly moons, and constellations that have been verbally passed down through the generations of our cultural ancestral heritage. Fortunately, we have relics of these traditions that still linger today. For example, some groups in the pacific island nations still practice and teach the art of way-finding, which is reading the stars and currents to navigate open ocean. The folkloric stories of their gods and ancestors that have been passed down through the generations illustrate just how connected these nations were with their environment. Another example we might draw inspiration from is the traditions of ancient northern European clans, who honored the solstice and equinox progressions with pagan rituals that consisted of dancing, bonfires, and feasting. Every culture in the world has their own traditions, rituals, and stories rooted in nature’s cycles that we can look to for inspiration in our own seasonal living practices.
In the grand scale of time in nature, it wasn’t that long ago when the human race was more connected to our planet and more in tune with our own life-seasons. Unfortunately, the majority of our modern cultures have evolved to favor hallmark and consumer-based holidays over our ancestral nature-based celebrations. Today we overextend ourselves in a purchasing frenzy at Christmastime instead of honoring the re-birth of the sun. We use google maps to find our way on a trail, and digital forecasts to know if it will rain or shine. We opt for reactive health care, rather than listening to our bodies and nourishing preemptively with the medicine found abundant in nature. It seems that we’ve separated ourselves so much from the rhythms of nature that we’ve forgotten where our wild bodies originated from and how our actions impact our planet and our own seasons of life. Somehow we’ve forgotten how to see how biologically interconnected we are with the natural world. Seasonal living, and the artful practice of connecting nature, is tonic for the body and soul. The good news is that this connection we intrinsically have with nature and our surrounding ecosystem can be easily rekindled. All nature asks of us is time spent with her.
Seasonal living is doing exactly that: spending time in nature and observing her workings. It is all about taking care to notice the delicate transformations in our environment as they happen through the year and adjusting the way we live in response. It’s about being more in tune with each of the micro seasons that fall within a single year and the life cycles of the flora and fauna that inhibit our ecosystems. It’s about growing our awareness of the interconnectedness of all beings and engaging in communication with nature. When we live seasonally, life becomes simple. We learn that nothing in nature is wasted and learn how she reuses and recycles to bring balance to her body. We remember where we came from and how we are viscerally connected to everything around us. Instead of resisting perceived inconveniences such as the sticky summer heat or the blizzards of winter, we embrace each unique season for what it is.
By doing this we also learn how to embrace each season of our own life and the life-seasons of those we love. We can more easily cherish the wisdom shared from our elders in senescence and the blooming innocence of our children in their youth. We can also more easily accept and anticipate the promised renewal of life that always follows death. Even within our overarching life-seasons, we also experience cyclical patterns of conception, rebirth, youth and so on. Through this seasonal lens, we can see that even in old age a new beginning is possible, and even within youth there is wisdom to be found. It is all a reminder that our human experience, no matter how messy it may seem, is completely natural and universal.
Through seasonal living rituals, we reconnect to the cycles of nature that drive us. We remember how to be stewards of the land and care for our wild bodies. And we do this through eating crops that are seasonally available, engaging in outdoor seasonally-based activities, celebrating the solar markers, and learning how to read nature’s signs. We craft with foraged finds to rediscover the value and personality of each plant. We learn how to preserve our summer cultivations for self-sustenance. We begin to share the stories of our ancestors once again. And, we rekindle a shared understanding with animals of the earth, that we all have a place here. Following the rhythms of nature is the process of remembering those ancient nature-led traditions and the visceral connection we have to each other, the land, and all life that surrounds us. It is a lifelong process of returning home; to our wildness and to the land we inhabit.
