Grieving Seasons
arcs, swirls, and strange eruptions in time10.13.26
Dear EARTH MOTHERS,
I can feel the seasons slipping away. Each one is more variable, stochastic, and strange than the last, with big temperature swings, changes in dryness and humidity, and weird storms. What used to be a yearly cycle now feels like a constant roller-coaster.
I know that there is nothing I can do about this: the changes in climate causing this have already happened, and there are more changes yet to come. But I find that I have no idea how to cope with the feelings that come with this loss. The erratic weather distracts and disorients me, and upsets my sense of home. Some days when the weather is extra-weird, I feel an upwelling of great sadness. The loss of predictable cycles is disrupting my life.
How should I come to terms with this change? What kind of space does a person make to sit with a loss of seasons? Are there practices or rituals that could help me maintain a sense of balance and cycles, against the increasing chaos? What might they look like? How big do they need to be? Or is this the wrong direction altogether? Should I be out protesting rather than trying to make peace?
How can I process and reshape my relationship to yearly time, as the usual, beloved markers of the year start to slip and slide?
Signed,
Grieving Seasons
………
Dear Grieving,
We EARTH MOTHERS are also experiencing the feelings and phenomena you describe.
It’s not surprising - seasons have been understood to be timeless and unchanging, a circle that turns and turns and turns, always moving but maintaining its reliable shape. For instance, traditional Northern European cycles are captured in “the wheel of the year,” with many iterations of this sturdy cyclical, round narrative of change.
Has this circular narrative become too closed? If things are unraveling - as EARTH MOTHERS often feel they may be now - perhaps we need visual stories of time with more arcs, swirls, strange eruptions outward, multiple strands folding and collapsing in.
What if some other geometry that is more open and strand-like is a better way to imagine the present moment?
And if that is the case, could these strands come together in new shapes? How do we understand these, map them, trace them? Can they be bent, stretched, pulled? And can we make these collectively recognizable, legible as time and season?
What shapes, Grieving, might you observe and want to make?
With possibility,
EARTH MOTHERS
Addendum - EARTH MOTHERS point to the pleasures and worlding of fiction, where archetypal landscapes (climate and weatherscapes) have been captured, described, experienced. A recent work of fiction points as a guide to moving through seasons - whether exactly mapping these shifts, or offering a chance for the reader to reflect on how they might pursue their own changing seasons. On the Calculation of Volume (Book II), by Solvej Balle (2024), transl. from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland.