You’re probably sitting in your home or office thinking, how many more months of this wet and cold climate must I endure? If that’s the case, I have some good news for you. The answer is 5 days, and then it changes. Let me explain.
In Japan, they have a gardening calendar that spans the year and divides it into 72 Seasons. Every 5 days is a new season and, being Japan, they give each season a poetic title. So far this year, we have lived through 5 seasons:
1-4 January Wheat sprouts under snow
5-9 January Parsley flourishes
10-14 January Springs thaw
15-19 January Pheasants start to call
20-24 January Butterburs bud
The current one is Ice thickens on streams (25-29 January). This year I’ve decided to post a short thought every 5 days on LinkedIn with a photo from my garden or somewhere close by. And then every month I’ll summarise a diary piece for the 26 Newsletter. My intention with all of this is not to turn you into a community of nature-lovers or gardeners (although that would be lovely). It’s to nudge you towards underlying thought that this calendar suggests: Be present. Pay attention. Notice more.
If you think Winter lasts 3 to 4 months, you’ll hunker down and wait for Spring. If, on the other hand, you have 5 days in which to enjoy and appreciate 1 of 72 changing seasons, you might just be on the look out for what’s happening right in front of you today. The idea of being present to what’s going on around you raised its head in a beautiful article doing the rounds by a nurse who tends the dying and took note of what her patients said in their final moments. There were 7 common themes and one of them was this: “Presence is the greatest gift you can give. Distraction is the modern disease of the living. We scroll through life like a rehearsal.”
So this is what the Japanese calendar is helping me to achieve, to be more present to what’s happening around me, whether that’s at work, with family and colleagues or in the garden. And this is where the photo comes in. By our front gate is this bush. It’s a Sarcococca. It does very little all year round. Until now. If you were to walk with me past this bush, we would be swept away by its sweet, fresh fragrance. You have to be quite close to it, but if you’re paying attention it’ll stop you in your tracks and you’ll get this unexpected burst of sensorial richness. You look around and think, “Where is this coming from?”. Now you know. Of course, you could just ignore it or have your mind elsewhere, but then you’ll miss one of nature’s great inventions.
In these months of ‘so-called’ Winter, there are signs of life everywhere: shoots and buds are bulking up and sprouting, lichen is crawling up branches, sunrises flare across the blackened sky, birdsong is back, crocuses march up the hill, tiny purple Cyclamen are braving the weather, the outlines of bare oak trees in dusk makes me think about the importance of structure and foundations. Every 5 days something new arrives, or at the very least, I notice something new because I’m now on the look out for it.
Where possible, I try and link what I’m seeing / smelling / hearing / touching into something I’m thinking about. For instance, many of us will have gone through the process of New Year’s resolutions or intentions. Great. But in January we need to create more space for those things we want to work on and improve. So with our intentions comes another equally important task, to find and make space within an already packed calendar. Something has to give. What will you let go of to accommodate the new intention?
– Alastair Creamer