Seasonality
Living more seasonally as a radical political act
In this era of Western culture in which we live in a 24/7 news cycle, when the act of having a cellphone is considered as implicit consent to be contact-able at any hour, when uniformly-stocked supermarkets and agricultural practices grant us access to produce and other foods every day of the year, and in which productivity and growth is valued more than well, everything, it’s easy to forget we live among constant seasonal change.
Leaves turn colors and eventually leave trees bare before returning with tiny green buds in the spring. Birds and butterflies migrate and return, other animals hibernate. And research, surprising exactly nobody, indicates that living more seasonally has a positive impact on humans, insisting we do have “annual rhythms in health and well-being.” But we are largely disconnected from that seasonality, and Western culture supports it completely.
In your writing, explore what living more seasonally might look like for you and what the benefit of doing so might be.
Indeed, many cultural, ethnic and spiritual communities have threads of this already: many religions are based on a lunar calendar, and holidays like the Jewish holiday of Sukkot (connected to the agricultural harvest cycle) and Pagan/Wiccan holidays like the Mabon and Ostara (connected to fall and spring equinoxes, respectively) already remind observers change is constant and perhaps meant to be embraced rather than avoided through prioritizing a uniformity to our days.
I’m prompted to consider this after seeing the display of pumpkins grow over the last few weeks outside my neighborhood grocery store, and realizing pumpkins are one of the few produce sights that are still truly seasonal. We might be able to buy squash all year, but big ol’ pumpkins? Who is buying that in April or May? And, of course, Halloween is not even here as of this writing, and I’m already weeks into seeing commercials with jingle bells discussing the perfect holiday gift.
And that made me think about our ability to savor a sense of specialness in having access to something only seasonally, and it made me think about how demand fuels our inability to do that. What if we refused to buy summer corn except in summer? What if we didn’t participate in holiday shopping or decorating until the actual holiday? What if we tried to live in the natural cycles of our environment and our minds and bodies instead of in the homogeneity of the Anthropocene? Let’s explore any aspect of that seasonality today that is calling to you. Let’s write.
