Immersing ourselves in the seasons, writing them down, is a way of telling an old circling story we need to hear—that everything will circle back to us, that there are no closed systems, no “externalities,” as economists call toxins and emissions. This is the primary story of ecology, a story that insists upon the circles. Now we know that carbon... See more

For Leopold and Thoreau, writing the cycles as narrative was a way of preserving them. Before they could understand that the burning of fossil fuels would literally rupture those cycles, they were concerned that we were losing the story that time moves in a circle.

And so there were once thousands of singular bioregional seasons unfolding across the continent’s diverse terrain each year.

Endless growth would deprive new life. The cycle must be fed. This is the problem with the straight line that rises ever upward. It is in opposition to the most fundamental story at the heart of the sun-circling earth, that to everything there is a season. When summer burgeons as if to burst, it dizzies and spins into fall—slows, retreats, rests.... See more

This is why I have been turning my attention toward the seasons so devotedly these past many years, keeping my field notebooks: to draw myself closer to the earth’s cycles whose disruption is, in fact, the most important story of our time; to keep myself centered; to not turn away from the story of these ancient cycles, even as they are unraveling;... See more

I suppose this is also to say, if it is not clear by now, that phenology is to me not just record-keeping but a kind of scripture. In this repetition and refrain, a single season gathers our memories and dreams as we add new layers of meaning to our lives—as we orbit the very meaning of being alive.

How quaint to write the date every summer when I see the first passionflower blooming in the field. How out of proportion to the news of the day. But when I read Thoreau, I am validated in my own impulse to write about the seasons. Taking note of seasonal events is a practice that can catalyze us to experience them more fully, to drink and taste... See more

he Japanese have seventy-two microseasons, traditionally, each lasting around five days, with names like “bamboo shoots start to sprout,” “praying mantises hatch,” “distant thunder,” and “frogs start singing.”

If the seasons are inhuman it is only because they are more than human, encompassing our lives in a great whirling dance beyond our control. We are swept up in them, we surrender ourselves to their turning.