The cycle of seasons personified - The January Man

 

I've put this song up before, either on this blog or my previous one, so I hope you're not bored by it. 

The steady plod of the instruments under Karine Polwart's lovely voice suggests to me the welcome relentlessness of the seasons' cycle. It'll roll round no matter what we do.

On the last day of the old year, with lots of nervousness and fussing about the political events likely to occur in the year ahead, lots of gloom and dismay about what is happening to our own society and cultures, bitter divisions in politics and public policy, I find, and I hope you do, solace here - right here and now, 31:12:16 - in knowing and feeling that I am part of the seasons' turning. It is in me, I am of it.

It's not a matter of being controlled by these cycles of change, it's more being part of them, the same "thing."

Why do disturbed city kids respond well (often/usually) to programmes that take them out into the countryside, or into  city farms? Is it just some lovely views, some sweet furry animals?

I think it is easier in these locations for them to feel, even if not to know rationally or consciously, that each of them is a natural system, a set of changes that is part of something much huger than each of them alone. 

"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever."

Are these lines lamenting the passing of time and the coming of age? I don't think so, because they contain both the wintry fever and the green fuse - the cycle.
 
That's how it is for all of us; we don't need to tell the crooked rose anything, in any literal sense. If we can be as one with the cycle of change, live in and with it, in this moment, then maybe we can carry our being-in-the-present through into whatever next year brings. It's bound to help.

What the fire said

This is the little church up our lane. Plenty of gravestones, plenty of memento mori. The churchyard is gearing up for its full-on spring burstings of celandines and primroses, and of course some daffs too.

 What, I hope you will soon be asking, has the coming of spring to do with this photo of our kitchen stove?

 (Can't hear anyone asking very loudly yet.....so I'd better carry on whilst you're still awake.)

In my work I encounter grieving people, and I'm dealing with some ongoing sadness myself at present. Grief, when it comes, is natural, and we would do better to go through it and accept it, than try to stifle or avoid it. (nb especially British chaps...)

So how best to live with the inevitable sadness of our human mortality? How to live with the impossibility, the raging unfairness and seemingly impossible fact of our extinction (to put it bluntly.) How - why - should we "put up with" the fact that it all comes to an end?

We might say, a little piously, that living with the awareness of death in our lives enriches them, makes them vivid and real, helps us live in the moment. True. Still, and all.....

So after walking up the lane and mementoing a spot of the mori, whilst at the same time enjoying the early spring springing, I sit down by the kitchen stove. I'll just be with the fire, look at the flames and think of nothing much.

Immensely calming. The fire is busy transforming substance into energy, heat and light. Feels lovely, looks lovely, feels...right. Part of me and my life. 

It's what the sun is busy doing, every star, the entire universe. Transforming, changing. If it didn't do that, nothing - you, me, the moons of Jupiter, the cat, daffodils - nothing would exist.

So yet again, feeling the reality of constant change as what life is, helps me with accepting mortality as what life is. This isn't so much an act of will or analysis, as it is the product of a sort of meditative state, I guess. Just being with it all, on its own terms, not mine.

It all feels right. Spring, gravestones, primroses - and the fire in the stove.

 Hope spring offers you some lovely moments, as the seasons' wheel turns, wherever you are.

The January Man and the rolling seasons

The seasons roll round. We have this idea of  days and months - it's the New Year. At the same time, a warm December makes it feel like early spring some mornings (when the rain isn't horizontal.) The seasons are the engines of natural change, uncontrollable, beyond our compass. Over this seething roll of energies, we throw nets of human meaning, such as "New Year's Day" or "January."

Here's Bert Jansch's beautiful song, in a version by Lau and Karine Polwart, to take us through the year. I hope you have a good 2016.