Alas, the storm is come again

It’s in us. When people have absolutely nothing else to talk about, they talk about the weather. The subject is not merely a placeholder- rather it is a subject that walks along in the back of every person’s head, a pace and a half behind the immediate present. The stumbling, “What do you think of this weather we’re having?” may be the small talk of last resort, but it is relevant.
Before we domesticated the wilderness of time with an armload of calendars- solar and sidereal, Gregorian and Julian, even the temptingly primitive lunar, and leashed it with the autistic clock, wild time was weather. This relationship transcends the familiar running-late time and emotes the past-life when-do-I-plant and the-herd-is-moving time.
Weather as time is the stuff of tribes, a communion from before we all half-connected from a thousand miles away. Weather-chatter asserts the sanctity of place, the worth of local community in the face of ever more globalization.
We have all but forgotten the visceral awareness that is so tangled with weather and tribe. We don’t know where the water comes from or where it goes. Do you have a well? How long has that water traveled? Does your tap pour from a reservoir? What grows on the slopes around it? We have convinced ourselves that grapes come from a perforated plastic bag that never zips exactly shut. If you knew the names of all of the chemicals sprayed on those grapes, would you know what they do?
In the coming days, resurrect weather as time, learn the secrets of your place. Stand outside your home and see in your mind’s eye where the sun rises in June and where in December. Divine where the first spring shoots rise, ultimately to process toward their next winter sleep.
Whether this place is your home since childhood or some brief limbo before you find yourself so soon stationed somewhere else, learn it.

I wait and watch

Friday evening, I took my wife to see the King’s Singers for her birthday. When I bought the tickets weeks ago, I had absolutely no inkling that the program would lend insight into the train of thought I’ve been following here.
The program was titled, Landscape and Time, as is their latest album. In introducing their newly recorded work, Christopher Gabbitas remarked, “we are, all of us, a product of our time and geography”. This commentary prefaced a performance of music from Estonia, Japan, England, Finland, and Hungary, but is equally well-suited to drawing-out a nonconformity common to modern life. Though place and time shape us, we seem to be selectively blind to these influences.
We remain very much creatures of time, but increasingly lose the element of geography. In particular we forget the intimate microgeography that in ages past was part and parcel of every human’s daily life. The land was family.
In a song combining the music of English composer Richard Rodney Bennett and the words of 17th century clergyman and poet John Donne, the ensemble observed, “we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons”. For the author, this was an immutable truth taught to him, not by a book, but in the lessons learned by living with eyes open. This former plain-fact is now much diluted, and the spiritual lesson Donne intended to convey with it may also be.
The translated text of an ancient Japanese poem appears in the program notes from Friday’s performance. Here again, words from the past use a collective appreciation of the natural world to artfully speak of the human condition. The union of person and place that creates such metaphors now grows dim in the periphery of the firelight of our minds.

Alone beside the river of birds
Near the stream’s upland source
I wait and watch
Beside a bridge of stones
And in this melancholy scene
I hear the nu-e-dori night bird
Cry out unanswered in the dark,
And then at dawn the morning-bird
Fluttering and flitting to-and-fro about its nest
Like a grieving prince, wilted by the heat of lost love,
Who roams, east-to-west, like the Evening Star,
Ceaselessly going and coming
In an endless round of departure and return.