The change of season always changes me. Weather and landscape, seem to be the obvious parts of that transformation.
I read a little about how other people react.
Robert Kull, author of Solitude: Seeking wisdom in extremes, spent a year alone in the wilds of Patagonia. He wrote:
“There is physical weather – sun, rain, wind – which just is, and my emotional response – pleasure, peace, anger, anxiety – that I associate with the weather. If I can tease these aspects apart and experience weather as weather and emotional response as emotional response, my days might be less dramatic and draining.”
Another author, David Abram in his book Becoming Animal notes that “shifts in the weather are changes in the disposition of the land. Different…kinds of weather are, precisely, different moods.” And each of these moods, he says, affects “the relation between our body and the living land in a specific way….”
In another book, The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram continues the thought:
“The world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it….is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn.”
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the first week of Early Fall. In the meantime, think about the experiences of Robert Kull and David Abram and watch to see how your moods follow the cooling air and the changing texture and color of the landscape as the new season develops.
