Today marks the vernal or Spring equinox here in Australia. Officially, Australia’s Spring began on September 1st, but if you follow an astrological calender, Spring begins today, as the daylight hours grow longer and the darkness of Winter truly fades.
An indigenous calender for the Kakadu season. White Australia is so young, and adrift from our European roots we have lost the art of seasonal connections.
There are existing knowledge systems of weather and seasons in Australia that were held by indigenous people. They could predict thunderstorms by particular tides, know hot weather was coming when the koalas were fighting. Knowledge was sacred, and shared amongst a select few and passed down through generations - thousands of years of observing nature that influenced culture. People from many nations would gather every few cycles and share these wisdoms to help guide their lives. It saddens me to think of the arrogance of the coloniser who believed them savages and imposed times and dates onto a terra nullius, a supposed no man's land.
The information, however, is being gathered, but it is up to us to connect. By doing so, we deepen connections to our own country and to the people that were here before us. The Bureau of Meteorology has created an Indigenous Weather Website (IWW) mapping indigenous understandings of the environment around them. It's a more subtle reading of the environment, more intricate and detailed than our rigid months systems that could not ever really fit this new world.
The seasons in Victoria according to custodians for the Grampians region, near us in Victoria
There's freedom in removing ourselves from the trappings of man made time marks. In consciously doing so, we remove ourselves from the limitations and boundaries of Europe that doesn't really help us connect to the landscape here, and we need it, to really connect and protect this land we profess to love. We need to tune in on a really deep level so that we can notice more quickly when things go wrong, be aware the changes that we are responsible for, and make moves to adjust and protect this land we are blessed to be on.
Personally, I connect to country - both to Australian metaphors of Rainbow serpents and cockatoos and lore from England, elements gleaned from literature, poetry, religions far and wide, stories, observations, mythologies. It's all in the interpretation, the moment. It's a multicultural, multilayered connection to cycles that is rich and beautiful.
Right now, the feeling of Spring here can’t be denied. For weeks now I have felt as if there are two forces vying for space – dark and light, cold and warm, joyful and free and somewhat cloistered and housebound. It’s when we give these fluctuations in the seasons and the world around us our attention that we also learn much about our place in this grand, grand life, our place in the whirling dervish of an Earth with the hem of her skirt spinning whitely around us, mesmerising. Captivating.
For a brief moment today everything seems in poetic harmony. A moment where things are still, for a change, caught in a balance as light and dark are almost in balance, yin and yang, sun and moon. The ennui of late winter gives way to a blossoming Spring, and so many of us (even those heading into Atuumn) are glad of the change as the tumult of the season before has tired us – too much of anything is exhausting.
I have been thinking a lot of annica or impermance in Buddhist thought. Everything rises and falls away. We forget this as we so stubbornly hold onto things – our beliefs, our identities, our possessions.
Yet the girl in the mirror is changing like the Earth changes – the decay is setting in, the wrinkles changing the features. There’s a slight disconnect – the internal view of self is not the external. And so she turns again to anicca, anicca, anicca – the breath rises, the breath falls. Winter leaves, Spring comes, and though Winter seems momentarily forgotten, there’s a deep knowing that Spring is only a great joy because of it’s impermanence. The great New England poet Robert Frost’s words echo across time and distance: ‘as dawn goes down to day, nothing gold can stay’. I wonder at an Australian equivalent in poetry – I’m sure there must be one.
We would do well to interact with the seasons on a deeper level than just dreams of suntans and barbecues. The deep consciousness of these cycles would make life easy to bear, knowing that we too are in constant flux. We have seasons in our lives – the child is Spring, the old ones Winter. Yet each year is a flux of seasons too for us – we cannot expect life to be constant, because that only brings suffering. We attach to the high of summer and the excited promise of Spring and are saddened at it’s passing, just as we attach to the good moments of our lives as if constant happiness is a benchmark against we live our lives.
It is not impermance that makes us suffer. what makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent, when they are not. Thic nhat hanh.
Such is the myth of happiness – that it is attainable, buyable, keepable, a bird in a cage. Happiness is only happiness because of the dark times in our lives. Spring cannot be Spring without the winter before it.
What would the seasonal map of your local look like? What system would it be based on? What do the seasons tell you? ###### Source
Knowing this attachment causes suffering when the day is over makes things more precioius, not less. We know we should not attach, but that doesn’t mean we can’t engage and enjoy what we do have. We should live each moment fully, each blossom enjoyed, each bird call trilling across the blue sky treasured and held. We whirl with the planets, hearts open, and we should allow the dance to slow when the seasons call for that too, and be okay with that, and full of grace.
And so I welcome in the Spring, this time of blossoming, promise and ideas, of social connections and projects underway, hopes and dreams out in full force. I gather energy like the possums running across the tin roof of my soul, and hold it close to the hearth at my centre, knowing I’ll need it later when the gold fades from the sky and winter comes again.
The calender months don't tell me much, but the Earth does.
And I listen.
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