Totally. I think it’s useful to have agriculturally based holidays for this purpose. Even if they’re ultimately detached from their original purpose (i.e. I don’t really need to know when the time to plant trees comes around), it’s useful to have these celebrations with seasonally specific rituals to mark the passage of time.
Tu b shvat just passed. It’s the Jewish holiday celebrating the birthday of trees. There’s snow on the ground where I live, we still celebrate and plant seedlings in the spring to follow up. I just like trees and it means spring is around the corner which is nice too.
OP was zen on an individual level. This was zen on a communal level 🧘
Climate change is messing it up, but it’s still a good idea
Yeah - a few years ago I moved to an area where the Robins returning meant the start of spring. They were here last week.
If you’re interested in doing this did yourself I recommended looking at the Wheel of the Year
You need to look at the Japanese 52 seasons calendar.
Very intrigued. I found 72 to be the number. Gotta figure out how to convert the events to different locations
Sorry, yeah. 72. And a Brit wrote a book translating them to his version. So maybe look there?
Last night I stuck all the major meteor showers into my calendar. I’d gone outside and seen stars and remembered how l much I love to see stars and I rarely stargaze nowadays. I’m going to make more of an effort, especially for the seasonal meteors.
You can add the NY Times astronomy calendar to your existing calendar if you don’t want to manually enter in data:
subscribe to the interactive feed that adds the events to your personal digital calendar. Google users can click on this link to subscribe. Apple iCloud and Outlook users may need to copy this URL and paste it into your digital calendar’s “add calendar” field to subscribe.
https://www.nytimes.com/explain/2023/astronomy-space-calendar
I’ve always done something like this, and it was odd to realize most people have no clue about nature’s rhythms.
For me, it begins in Spring with the song of the robins, and slowly transitions into red-winged blackbirds singing their song in the wetlands. That eventually dies out somewhere during early summer and I get really depressed. After that all I have to look forward to is the call of the flicker in the late evenings.
I had one apartment where every summer a countless hoarde of swallows would take up residence :)
Did this motherfucker just politely tell me to touch grass?
Today I heard bird noises when I woke up. I hate spring, and somehow we don’t even get birds that actually sing instead of voicing a monotone “cheep cheep cheep”.
Pick up some “songbird mix” seed bags and start putting some out to attract the singing birds :)
Y’all got any more of that spring? I’ll take your
cheepcheeps, too.
I look forward to autumn because the weather gets real nice on the southern hemisphere.
That sounds stressful to me. Like I don’t have enough to worry about without wondering where the fuck the birds went, or remember to water the magnolias.
It’s like how I spend the winter months thinking "Oh yeah, winter was a thing we used to have
