We Are Seasonal Beings

Facebook’s “memories” feature is a double-edged sword that sometimes cuts deeply. Anyone separated from a loved one by death or a painful rift can tell you that. Sometimes you may also see old posts written about trips never taken, stories excitedly started but abandoned before fully written. But looking at my memories over time has also made one fascinating thing quite clear to me: we humans are seasonal beings.

Over and over again on my Facebook memories it will happen: I will start craving soup, and I’ll look and see I’ve made soup on the same day two years ago. I’ll start thinking about making art from autumn leaves to express the beauty of the season, and memories will show me the time a few years ago when I painted leaves to resemble animals. Most recently, I started craving apple cider donuts the same day I drove a half hour away to purchase a whole box of them last year.

At first when I noticed these recurring memories, my response was dour: was I only repeating the same patterns in my life, year by year, as the years went by? Was I in some sort of endless loop?

Well, to be frank, yes.

But then I started thinking: is it such a bad thing to be bound by the seasons? To have a part of us that, no matter how out of touch we (as humans) grow with nature, still responds to cues in her changing façade? Squirrels run to the nearest tree for acorns when their hunt for winter sustenance should grow more urgent. Bears yawn with the need to hibernate at just the right time when the cold chill of winter starts to creep in on frost-rimmed fingers behind the golden glow of autumn. And in the middle of winter, when the sun hides her face too often and natural sources of vitamin d are scarce, I start to crave the tart tang and bright orange rinds of mandarin oranges.

So much about our modern world is about progress, about constantly measuring growth and change in our lives. How much have we achieved since we graduated? Are we constantly moving upward in our careers? In our accomplishments? We get so engrossed in constant upward momentum, we forget the beauty of moving in a circle instead.

We are bound to the earth. Some bodies move with the tides, with the moon, even in the middle of a landlocked city where smog dims the night sky. No tree feels ashamed to have lost their leaves again instead of achieving some brave new invention of being, to cycle around again to buds when the sun starts to shine again and sap flows in their veins. No bird begins to cry when they realize it is time to fly south again for winter. We should be gentler with ourselves. To be seasonal beings, to move in rotation instead of progression, is simply to mirror the face of our mother, Earth. And what greater and more noble achievement could there possibly be?