We are in Florida for the winter this year and it feels like I am missing something important. I am missing the winter my body is used to, like I am skipping a season that my body needs. And I have begun to allow myself to say I am homesick. I am out of my cycle, my season. I am not at home.
Florida has seasons too—they are just so different and subtle. The plants, trees, and palms here are in a more dormant stage now, and not flowering, though a majority still retain their green foliage. And if I lived here year-round, I would eventually settle into the rhythms of this almost tropical land that has its own magic and beauty. But these seasons are so very different than the ones my body is used to, the ones it craves, that I am off kilter.
Many people come to Florida to escape the winter, and I get that, especially in the far north where the winters are so long and hard. But others come in a quest for an endless summer, for endless sun. One version of a Florida license plate even has the tag line, “Endless Summer.” This may be the deepest way we scourge our relationship with our Earth—the most insidious way we deny the animate body of the planet that gives us life—by breaking and denying the daily and seasonal cycles of ebb and flow that sustain us.
Living in a time when nature’s seasons and cycles are rapidly changing from the steady patterns of the last several thousand years is unsettling and stressful. When it is not cold or wet when it is supposed to be cold or wet; and when it is hot or dry when it is not supposed to be hot or dry, how do we know how to behave? I just finished reading a novel by Barbara Kingsolver called Flight Behavior, about the monarch butterflies that usually overwinter in Mexico. In her story they have gotten confused and come to spend a winter on a rural mountaintop in Tennessee, because their homes in Mexico were destroyed by massive flooding and landslides. Many of the butterflies die when the temperature finally dips into the twenties, but in the deluge at the end of the book with the coming of spring, the ones who survived fly out in search of new homes, but without the certainty of the patterns and places they had always known. Kingsolver writes, “A world where you could count on nothing you’d ever known or trusted, that was no place you wanted to be.”
And yet, this is increasingly where we are finding ourselves. In a time when our natural cycles are getting confused, it is more important than ever that we listen to our bodies and the bodies of all the beings around us and stay connected with them. When seasonal cycles we have always relied on are disordered, we need our own cycles, our patterns, our ways of finding connection more than ever. Creating new cycles, new patterns, is hard. In short, we need crash courses on listening to our bodies, our intuition, and how to hear the more than human world all around us. The flowers, plants and animals are already changing faster than they ever have in their millions of years of evolving on our planet. And they want to help us change and adapt too.
I long to return home to the mountains and to my garden and today I am thinking about valerian’s calming presence. I tucked the crowns of their roots back into my garden beds last fall after I harvested their long feeder roots. They are so generous, sharing their roots with me and still growing again each spring. I am remembering their vanilla fragrance wafting on the spring breeze, their flower stalks tall and stately, while their earthy, musty roots are growing full of deep knowing of their home in the dirt. “Relax,” they say to me. “Allow me to slow your breathing and soothe your nerves and remove you from the worry and chatter of the world.” And I am reminded of Julian of Norwich’s famous quote, “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”
In these unfamiliar places and unknown times that we increasingly find ourselves, it is more important than ever to listen to our bodies, our feelings, and our intuition so that we can be open to hear the messages that the flowers, the plants, the animals and the land want share with us. Messages that remind me what my body already knows—that everything in our world is animate and sacred. Messages that carry the wisdom of millions of years of the cycles of the sun, the seed and the soil. Messages that help us remember that life always finds ways to create new life. My work is simply to settle into myself enough to be aware. My next step in the circle, the next cycle, will make itself known when I listen.
Thank you for acknowledging that the south has 4 seasons. i get so tired of hearing northern folks say we don't really have seasons. I'm grateful that Texas has a much milder than the north, which I would hate. It is so strange to me that people like living where it only warms up 3 months out of the year. But I do understand that some part of us longs for where we grew up. When I was a young woman, I lived for a year in Alameda CA. I remember looking out the window and seeing folks walk down the street in shorts. "Ah!" I thought. "How exciting. It has warmed up." I jumped into my shorts, ready for a walk, and ran outside. Holy moly! It was 55 or 60 degrees outside! It was waaaay to cold for shorts, and I had to return and change.
Love this post, Mary. I know how you feel about missing one place while you are at another. To me it's a bit like being split in two. Or leading two lives. Very challenging.