I’m interrupting my sharing of Guernsey gallivanting to settle into a little seasonality: to send everyone Equinoctal blessings for your harvesting and stock-taking becasue my understanding of the Equinoxes and the Solstices has just been nudged into a different pattern that makes so much more sense to me.
I’m reading “Winters in the World” by Eleanor Parker. The title comes from the Anglo-Saxon literary evidence that ‘Winters in the world’ was how our ancestors at that time spoke of their age: in terms of how many Winters they had endured. I don’t think I’d really grasped that the “Anglo-Saxon period” lasted about six centuries. Six hundred years. Six hundred Winters. That last way of expressing it seems somehow much longer than the first two.
I’m loving this book because it is an interplay of poetry and history and belief. I’m also loving it because of the snippets of the old language and how, in reading it aloud, I can hear the tonalities of my northern upbringing, I can hear the Germanic and Viking influences. I’m loving that the author makes the linguistic connections between those old words and the ones we still use.
Mostly though, right now, I’m loving that it has brought me back to thinking about the seasons and our connections with and disconnections from them. An appropriate thing to be thinking about at the Equinox.
To begin with in these parts, by which I mean the outer edges of northern Europe, it would seem that our ancestors worked with only two seasons. Winter and Summer.
Apparently, the word Winter goes back a long way and has been constant. Winter is the season of unchanging hardship.
Summer or Sumor seems to have been more changeable. In some places or at some times it was referred to as Gear or Geare – the word that has transmuted to Year. So presumably while some were measuring their ages by the number of Winters they had endured, others were counting how many Summers, how many Geares, they had enjoyed.
Somewhere along the line, the measurement of time within a single turn of the earth shifted from the two seasons (Winter & Summer) to four. The earliest renditions of those four are (in our modern spelling) Winter, Lenten, Summer and Harvest. Understanding this helps me to make more sense of the Wheel of the Year, and why the festivals fall where they do.
Midsummer and Midwinter make no sense in our modern way of thinking about the seasons, but if we go back to those original four, the how-&-why of them emerges more clearly.
In that view of the world, it is the cross-quarter days that mark the beginning of the seasons – the festival days that survive from the lunar calendars of the Celts and their kin – and the quarter days from the Viking solar calendars and adopted by the scientists and liturgical calendrical scholars then become the mid-points. This is the reverse of the way we tend to think of it these days, because we’ve forgotten the original agricultural connection.
If we think of the seasons in terms of Winter, Lenten, Summer and Harvest – we have the times of little work and cold, the lengthening of the days with more light and much work, the Summer brightness and growing, and then the gathering in. In terms of working the land, it makes more sense that Winter would begin at Samhain (the beginning of November), Lenten (which we now call Spring) would begin at Imbolc (in February, when we can really notice how the days are lengthening and the ground beginning to soften), Summer at Beltane (the beginning of May and the first warm weather) and Harvest at Lammas (in August) when the first fruits are ripe along with the early corn, the first legumes etc.
If we accept those beginnings of the seasons (Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane & Lammas – whatever names we choose to give them) then the solar quarter days of the Equinoxes and the Solstices fall at the mid-points between them. The Winter Solstice actually is mid-winter. The Summer solstice is mid-summer.
I had learned that the cross-quarter days, the fire festivals from the Celts are the midpoints between the solar extremes and balance-points, when actually it is the other way around.
I’m writing this at the Autumnal Equinox in the northern hemisphere. With our modern mindset we think this is the start of Autumn. The season of decay has barely started. Summer has barely ended. But that is only because we have become accustomed to a way of thinking which has disconnected us from our historic relationship with the seasons, which was based in out historic relationship with the land itself.
If we think about Autumn (and all the other seasons) in terms of weather, rather than work, then this makes a certain amount of sense. If we think of this season as Autumn, or Fall, then it is only about now that the leaves do begin to turn and shed. The worst Winter weather in the UK tends to be from late December onwards. If we think ‘weather’ then calling the Winter Solstice ‘Mid-winter’ makes no sense.
If we go back, though, and think ‘work’ rather than weather– if we think as the Anglo-Saxons did, a people who already had both the Celtic influences and the Viking ones (leavened with a heavy dose of Greco-Roman mythology and cosmology and calendrical mysticism) – then Winter begins with
the first cold and dark and short days at the beginning of November (Samhain) and runs through to the noticeably lengthening days of February (Imbolc). In that mindset, the Solstice absolutely is the mid-point. Winter isn’t about weather. It’s about the dark days when there’s nothing to harvest and not enough light to be planting or ploughing. Days are cold, dark, short and there’s not much to be done.
In that year-view of the world, this season that we now call Autumn, was all about the harvest. It’s not about the Fall – a concept tied to calendars that are removed from the direct earth-connection of the agricultural labourer. If we think as they did, then this season is Harvest, and evidently – even now – we are about half way through it. My strawberries and blackberries are finished, pears are still ripening, tomatoes also. Even in my small patch I am only half-way through my harvesting.
“So what?” you might be thinking. “It’s interesting, but does it matter?”
I think it does, because I think it goes to the heart of our disconnection with the planet. We talk about the need to live and eat “seasonally” and “locally”. I’m sure that must be easier in warmer climes where more interesting food grows more readily, but even here on the north-western edges of Europe, it should be possible without subsisting on root veg for half a year.
But if we want to grow and harvest and forage (or even shop) with mindful attention to the seasons, then we need to get back in touch with who those seasons are: when they are born and when they pass away.
We have lost our sense of the turning of the year, in the true sense of birth, growth, harvest, decay & rest, because we have been drawn into academic years, or church years, or financial years, or tax years, or calendar years. All of those have ancient roots of their own, but those roots are not in the fundamental connection with planting and growing our food, of tending our flocks, looking after our beasts. Because most of us don’t directly do any of that stuff anymore, we have stopped caring about it. I can’t help thinking that if we started caring, maybe indirectly and over time, we could make life easier for those who do directly plant & harvest & tend to the animals, and maybe we could live more sustainably in the process. Just maybe if we nudged ourselves back to those old names for the seasons and the old way of reckoning them Winter, Lenten, Summer, Harvest, we would find it easier to align oursleves with our planet, deepen our connection with our home.
A little aside: something I have always struggled with in my weilding of words. We treat days and months as “proper nouns”. We give them capital letters. Traditionally, in English, we do not do the same for the seasons, though I know different languages have different conventions. In English, we capitalise the days and the months, but not the seasons. That has always jarred with me.
I instinctively do write Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn. Capital first letters when using them as nouns rather than adjectives. It feels wrong not to do so. The not doing so is downgrading these things to something less important than Mondays and Tuesdays or Junes and Julys etc when surely they are intrinsically much more important to our wellbeing.
A simple thought: if you care about the seasons give them their "proper" names. Whether you call them by their old names or their current ones, treat them as friends and allow them the dignity of a capital letter. A subtle shift, but who knows how or what it might shift more deeply?
I am learning many other things from Eleanor Parker’s fabulous book but if I took nothing else other than this paradigm shift on the seasons, it would have been a generous enough gift. Thank you Tina for the loan…I will have to buy my own copy!
In the meantime I wish you all the pleasures of your first fruits and a bountiful gathering in this second half of Harvest. Go gently and in gratitude for the gifts of the season.
