Weekend journaling prompt

Our personal seasons

You can read my recent interview in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review here • Take out or renew an annual subscription in May, and you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win a lovely box of goodies • Our next silent sit, a companionable hour’s silence for full members, will be on Sunday 18th May, 5pm - 6pm UK.

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In the middle of this week, I realised we’d reached a very particular moment in the year. It was two days before Bert’s birthday (he’s just turned 13; hold me), the day when I always say, at 7pm, ‘My waters broke about now.’ I find that it’s important to remind people that I endured a 44-hour labour, just to make sure they don’t forget my sacrifice. It is also the exact pinpoint in the year when the May blossom overtakes hedgerows, the bluebells are at their peak, and my friend Hanne moves her living room into ‘summer formation’ as she calls it, swapping the dining table and the sofa so that she can bask in the evening sun.

These markers - this specific point in the lived year - mean very little outside of my own household, my own life. But they matter a great deal to me. I mostly forget them until they come around again, and then I greet them like a long-lost friend. Life is constantly changing, but the year has its familiar points, and I’m grateful to see them.

It’s well-known that the Japanese recognise 72 micro-seasons, each lasting about five days, across the year. Spring arrives when the ‘East wind melts the ice’ (4th - 8th February), and ends when the ‘peonies bloom’ at the end of April. The ‘frogs start singing’ (5th - 9th May) to herald the coming of summer, and ‘plums turn yellow’ just before the solstice (16th - 20th June). At the beginning of August (3rd - 7th), ‘great rains sometimes fall’, and the ‘swallows leave’ around about my birthday (18th - 22nd September). The ‘first frost’ arrives in late October (23rd - 27th), and a month later, ‘rainbows hide’. On December 7th - 11th, the ‘cold sets in, winter begins.’ We wait again for the East wind.

Beautiful though they are, we cannot adopt Japan’s very exact seasons as our own. I doubt they even work for the whole of Japan. And in an age when the seasons are being disrupted - even dismantled - we may need to grieve the markers by which we’ve navigated our years since time immemorial, and also acknowledge the personal seasons that only we know.

Today’s journaling prompt is all about understanding the patterning of our years.