Living with the seasons

It’s odd. Starting this post, I realise I can be honest, or I can hide behind some of my uglier choices.

Honesty it is.

This morning, I laid down some black plastic in the back part of the property*, to stop ‘weeds’ growing in a part of the garden that is very difficult to maintain. It’s an area I’m planning to grow vegetables, and there is this strip behind the beds, along a back fence, that will become overrun. The property backs onto a reserve, and the council doesn’t mow often, so the plants from the reserve march into the vegetable growing area and compete for sunlight, water and nutrients.

I’m not proud to be using plastic, but I do re-use it for different purposes, and here, it’s a short term measure while I establish the gardens and learn the relations of this place.

Anyway, while doing this task, I was listening to a podcast episode from the Emergency Magazine podcast that a dear colleague recommended to me. It’s called A Thousand Ways to Live Within the Seasons: A Conversation with David G. Haskell, Dara McAnulty, and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.

I have made it a practice of not listening to podcasts, or talking on the phone when I garden. I want to be in moment: witnessing, participating. The phone distracts me. But these episodes connect me to place. They also give me permission to use all my senses, to feel my emotions, to know the other-than-human world. And so sometimes I do listen to episodes from this particular podcast.

This episode was fun, but also insightful and moving. We are so disconnected from the seasons. I was particularly moved (and shocked) by this part of the conversation when David said:

“And so my concern is that most people think of autumn as a time when Starbucks has pumpkin spice latte. And that the solstice season is a time when you put your Spotify Wrapped up on social media. And so this increasing disconnection—I think we are at crisis point. When the most powerful species in the world ceases to listen to the voices of other species and lives within structures and institutions that actively discourage this through policies and algorithms and fairly well-established cultural practices now, we are not going to be good kin, we’re not going to be good neighbors. And so there’s a joyful element to connecting with the hundreds of seasons wherever we live. But there’s also, I think, a sort of moral imperative to do so, so that we can open ourselves to the necessary knowledge that comes from the living Earth and that comes from the people who know this place the best, wherever that place is on the world, so we can find our way to right action.”

I am going to practice sensing the seasons. And not as the four distinct markers in a calendar, but relationally. What am I witnessing as change, where is it happening, where is it not happening, what arises from those happenings? How is my body responding to the changes in temperature? What do I seek when it’s cold (definitely warmth!?) and how can I stay with the cold southerly breezes on my beach walks, the crisp mornings? How can I attune my body to these seasonal rhythms and stretch out that period of discomfort when I feel the cold? How can I really come to experience seasonal change in my body?

*I acknowledge I am on the unceded, sovereign lands of the Walbunja People of the Yuin Nation and by using the term ‘property’ am subscribing to western notions of ownership. I remain attentive to these injustices, including advocating for ‘relational commons’, and am working towards methods to connect with Country through relationship and practice - stay tuned.