Thanks for the beautiful post, TB.

Having been born and bred in tropical climes, and having spent most of my life in places where the seasonal rhythms are muted and subtle, I feel particular attuned to the progress of the seasons. I lived for eight years in the San Francisco Bay area, a lovely place with its own peculiar seasonal variation, but I also spent five years in western Pennsylvania and a year in eastern Tennessee, so the distinct character of the earth's heartbeat is particularly poignant for me. How astounding that the simple 23.5 degree tilt of the earth's axis could result in such a cycle of exquisite variation. Even more amazing is how life has adapted to accomodate to and exploit this single astronomical phenomenon.

The earth has its rhythms, the cycle of day and night, the yearly orbit around the parent star, and the monthly journey of our moon. The tides beat unceasingly against the coast, the great air masses and ocean currents follow themselves across the continents as the sea and the atmosphere respond and the life on the planet does as well. No doubt there are other cycles too, the precession of the equinoxes and the drift of the continents, the swelling and shrinking of the ice caps, at different time scales our bodies are not in resonance with. Somewhat isolated by our civilization and our technology, we still sense these rhythms when the dogwoods bloom and on the first real fall day, when that bite in the air tells us summer is finally over. And in the dead of winter, when there seems to be no trace of life anywhere, we know that hidden in the bare branches and gray skies and in the leaf litter between the cold soil and bare stones and the sterile snow are the promise of the explosion of spring and luxuriant summer growth that is just around the corner.

Those of us fortunate enough to know the sky can read these signs particularly well, as the stars and constellations and the angle of the sun and the length of the days synchronize and herald the change. There is the promise of new life and unending change, but there is also the reminder of our own mortality. The cold, eternal stars remain the same. Our life has its four seasons too, and like the astronomical year, it begins with spring and ends in winter.

We can understand this if we look and feel, and of course, the beasts have always known it, deeply and instinctively. They have their cycles and their migrations. I remember the geese from my times up north, and I've always wondered just what it is they think and feel, when miles above the earth, in the company of their fellows, they fly through the long night in the bitter cold air, driven by a memory in their genes that has developed over the eons. There is a wisdom there that we risk losing, although we are beasts too, and we must surely know what they know, deep inside us.