Micro-seasons, Baden Powell, a Galaxy Ripple, and Cauliflower and sage soup
Abundance: 14 January 2025
The traditional Japanese calendar has 72 kō micro seasons to the year; windows of 5 or so days characterised by the coming together of particular phenomena - bud burst of this, that bird arriving etc - with rituals, celebrations, foods coming into season and more. I love that idea. Today the day seemed noticeably longer than the close of last week, the skies a little fuller of birdsong; something beyond weather. Today, draws to a close the kō characterised by the words ‘Springs once frozen flow once more’
The passing of a man through middle age might well be comprised of a similar number of micro-seasons of loss of dignity: when trying on your new shorts you stare into the mirror and Baden Powell stares back; a few years later, you wear a coat of which you are unsure of the shade or style but you rejoice in its warmth, and suddenly warmth is enough. For me, today is that day.
Needing a leg-stretch in a place likely without people, I took to the hill to the east of the town. Stepping out from the trees, the wind hit me in the face like a cold carrier bag, my body luxuriantly impervious to it. I felt a deep smugness, of the kind ordinarily reserved for something as monumental as casting a scrunched up wrapper into the bin, from distance, with a pleasing clank.
It became a walk defined by the carry of a woodpecker’s busy head-butting. I left the car to the 20-donks-a-second sound of his distant work, a sound that reminds me of childhood cartoon running sound effects. Being in the company of a woodpecker will never not make me happy.
It is to this hill I come in spring for gorse flowers, coconutty in scent and flavour, to infuse in rum, sugar syrup and more. It does pretty well on these high peaks of red-brown mudstones, uncoincidentally of the same colour as the bricks that make so many of the houses down the slope.
I head to the sea, a cliff fall - the path now many metres below - causing me to take a different turn along the coast. We take to the field where the dog is driven half crazy by a family of rabbits long-gone to the warren, who’ve scattered their poo like Maltesers, like Revels, like Treets, across the field: he runs between them as if a baseball homerunner, or doing doggy circuits, lost to the joy of the very best his culinary world has to offer.
We make slow poo-eating progress to the edge of the dip to the valley, where I’m greeted by a Jaffa cake sunrise. The sea is as smooth as the surface of a Ripple.
A rash of wishes for the days ahead fills my brain: one early summer day, when the light beats people’s alarm, I want to lay on a paddleboard in the shallows just off thatn beach on a morning as still as this; in late spring, I’ll walk to that Dorset field of flowering broad beans, still the most intoxicating scent I’ve ever smelt; and perhaps this will be the year I make it to Plum Village. I make a quiet promise to myself and my still sleeping wife to soon come to the beach below, frying pan in hand, to make a fire and breakfast before the sunrises.
Retracing my steps, a robin hops out of invisibility onto skeletal blackthorn. A friend wherever they appear: I’m not sure how much I believe they are the feathery representation of someone who has died come to visit, but I know it gives my mum much comfort and I do hope it’s true.
As we leave the field of (rabbit poo) dreams, a clutch of 9 young house sparrows lifts from the hedge, briefly forming a moving Cassiopeia against the blue sky as they flitter up the valley, and I follow them home, the woodpecker still knocking its way into the day.
Tomorrow starts the kō, Kiji hajimete naku - Cock pheasants begin to call; I shall keep an ear out.