Living in Season
The official newsletter of School of the Seasons

April 23, 2009

Contents

Seasonal Poem
Living in Season: Late Bloomer
Email Tip
Celebrating Hidrellez
Calendar Companion Project
A New Sort of Pilgrimage
For Your Summer Pleasure:
• May Day Packet
Illustrated Calendar Companion
Summer Natural Planner
Vacation Summit
Valuable Links
• Mindfulness Chime
• Slow Planet
Signs of Summer
Copyright
Subscribe - Unsubscribe

Seasonal Poem:

Reluctant quince
Shouts red again
A verve for joy
Undaunted

You, friend
Always in bloom
Within

—Jeanne Castle

My Season: Late Bloomer

Does anyone else feel like the year started more slowly than usual this year?

I just made my New Year cards last weekend and am doing my New Year reading this weekend. This may be the first year that spring didn't begin for me on February 1, but started around March 21 and is slowly unfurling, taking me along with its green tide.

All around me the plants are sprouting and blooming and leafing at a rapid pace. It's the first time in my life that I've wanted to stop the forward progress of the force that through the green fuse drives the flower: I want to hold onto this moment of potential, when the trees are just unfurling those brilliant yellow-green leaves that seem to glow in the sun. Slow down, slow down, I want to say. I'm not ready for the full leaf shade glory of summer yet.

I've been delighted by the responses to my request for photographs to illustrate the Calendar Companion. I've also been enjoying the posts from the students in my Slow Time class. They confirm that I'm moving in the right direction in creating a magazine (launch date is now May 15, after my web designer, Joanna Powell Colbert, returns from her trip to the Tarot School Readers Studio in New York).

My goal is to create a community that will nurture the concepts of slow time, sacred time and seasonal time. My hope is that working with others who share these ideas will stimulate my creativity. So far it seems to be working well, as you will see by sampling all the contributions from readers I'm sharing in this newsletter.

May summer offer you many opportunities for creative collaboration,
Waverly Fitzgerald

Email Tip

I wrote in my last newsletter about trying to cut down on my email overload and Rachel Kopel shared with me her email tip for dealing with the emails that pile up in your inbox when you go on vacation. She clicks on the top line and organizes them by sender. Then she can go through and delete those she doesn't want (advertising, messages that are obsolete, etc.) in batches.

Celebrating Hidrellez

One of my School of the Seasons readers, Julia Pacacioglu, who is living in Istanbul, sent me information about the holiday of Hidrellez, the Anatolian version of our May Day.

Like May Day, it is viewed as both the first day of summer and also the height of spring. It happens on May 5 and 6 (I assume it begins on the eve of May 5). It is celebrated mainly by the Alevi faction of Muslims (whose religion is a mix of ancient shamanic customs and Islamic beliefs) and the Gypsies (chingeneler).

It is a day for making wishes. Julia writes: Everyone goes around tying pieces of fabric and paper to designated trees for wishing. You're also supposed to write or draw a picture of what you desire and hang it on the thorn of a rose bush the night of Hidrellez. The next morning before sunrise you must take it off the rosebush and when the wish comes true, you must throw the paper in running water, like a river or a stream.î You can also put money under a rosebush on the evening of Hidrellez for good luck. Usually people put a nickel or a penny that they have marked with paint or nail polish. The money must be collected before the sun rises on Hidrellez and never spent (that is why it is marked).

Julia also sent the following list of beliefs about Hidrellez:

1) There are no clouds in the sky on the day and night of Hidrellez. (This reminds me of beliefs about Ascension in the Christian tradtion; Ascension is May 21 this year.)

2) If one gets out of bed before the sun rises on the day of Hidrellez, their work will go badly and they will become ill. (Then how does one retrieve the wish or money from the rose bush?)

3) It is unlucky to work on the day of Hidrellez

4) If you swing on a swing on the day of Hidrellez, your back will get sore. (Julia notes that low backs are the source of many Anatolia ata sozuî or old wive's tales.)

5) It is unlucky to hold iron on the day of Hidrellez

6) If you scare a barren fruit tree with an axe on the day of Hidrellez (presumably you threaten to cut it down) it will bear fruit.

7) Pregnant women who do housework on the day of Hidrellez will give birth to deformed or handicapped children.

Many of these injunctions, though slightly ominous, hint at the importance of taking a holiday.

For more information on the festival as it is celebrated in Istanbul:

http://www.hidrellez.org/english.asp

Calendar Companion Project

I enjoyed all of the photographs I received as submissions for my Calendar Companion project and learned a lot from them. One is that I wasn't specific enough about what I'm looking for.

I'm looking for pictures that will convey a sense of the current season (and here I'm thinking North America--with an apology to those of you down South-- since my themes are chosen with North American seasons in mind). Even though I believe that pets and people are part of nature, I'm focusing on natural subjects. I love close-ups of plants or birds or amazing landscape photographs, the kind you might see in Audubon or National Geographic. I know it's hard to interpret these themes in photographs; that's why I'm counting on your creativity.

Here are the upcoming themes (and a few from the past) that I'd like to illustrate in photographs:

• Spring (Feb/March/April) themes
• Spring fever (birds, birds mating)
• Spring clearing (fast, Lent)
• Thinning (as in too many plants, too many things to do)
• Summer (May/June/July):
• Mothering (self care, nurturing, comfort)
• Freedom
• Do less
• Burnout

If I use your photograph, you will receive credit, plus a free subscription to the Calendar Companion for the rest of the year and a free copy of the Calendar Companion Weekly Planner for 2010.

Send your submissions to Waverly@waverlyfitzgerald.com.

A New Sort of Pilgrimage

Inspired by the famous opening to Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer recommends April as the month when folks long to go on pilgrimages, I wrote about pilgrimage for an April newsletter in 2005:

http://www.schooloftheseasons.com/
newletters/news040205.html

One of my readers, Louise, sent me a photograph (for the Calendar Companion project) to illustrate the theme of pilgrimage. She explained that when she and her husband moved from a Montreal suburb to a remote place in the north, they visited all the places in the city that were meaningful to them. This pilgrimage lasted a whole month. They took photographs of their favorite places and later, Louise made her husband a CD containing Powerpoint slide show of the photographs with comments, as a modern souvenir album.

I thought some of you who are curtailing travel plans this summer, might like this idea of going on pilgrimage to nearby places which embody your treasured memories and perhaps creating souvenirs to cherish for years to come.

For Your Summer Pleasure:

Holiday Packet: May Day

May Day is rich in customs, perhaps more so than any other day of the year. So says the Oxford Companion to the Year. If you are interested in learning about some of these customs, order my May Day packet, an illustrated portfolio of over 30 pages which includes:

• Ancient traditions of Floralia, Beltane & May Day
• Instructions for creating a Maypole and dancing around it
• Recipes for May wine and other traditional May Day foods
• Special May Day divinations and songs
• The language of the flowers
• Ideas for May Day gifts.

It is available in an email version for $10 (sent within 24 hours) or via snail mail for $15 (please allow 10 days for delivery). Order in our Store.

Natural Planner/Summer Workbook

One of my natural planners who lives in Florida just wrote me to express her appreciation for this method of planning. She said that this was the first spring she didn't overload her to-do list. And, as a result of the dreams she set at the start of the year, she moved from the suburbs to a 100 year old farmhouse on 150 acres near the woods where she is enjoying reconnecting with the seasons.

If you'd like to try a new way of planning your life, try the Summer workbook of the Natural Planner. It helps you set goals for the months of summer that are in alignment with the season and your relationship to its themes.

You can order the Summer Natural Planner or the whole year at:

http://www.schooloftheseasons.com/store.html#naturalplanner

Vacation Summit

My friend, John de Graaf, who came up with the concept of Take Back Your Time day, is sponsoring a Vacation summit this year in Seattle from Monday, August 10 to Wednesday, August 12 (prime vacation time). John really knows how to put on a good conference, by inviting a mix of people from different disciplines and giving them plenty to time to hang out and talk to each other. I would totally recommend this event if the topic sounds interesting to you. This blog post contains most of the information about what's planned:

http://consciousconsuming.blogspot.com/2009/04/national-vacation-matters-summit.html

Valuable Links

Mindfulness Chime

Jo, one of the students in my current Slow Time class, found this website that provides a mindfulness bell you can set to ring on your computer, to call you back to the present moment and breathe when you're lost in cyberspace:

http://www.mindfulnessdc.org/mindfulclock.html

Slow Planet

While looking around to see if anyone else is using the term Slow Time, I found the Slow Planet web site developed by Carl Honore, who wrote a marvelous book about the slow movement: In Praise of Slowness. I'm hoping to persuade him to let me blog for him on the topic of Slow Time. If you think that's a good idea, let him know.

www.slowplanet.com

New Illustrated Calendar Companion

Now illustrated with beautiful photographs of nature from School of the Seasons reads which illustrate the themes.

Every week for 52 weeks you will receive a brief email with a reflection on the qualities of the present time period and one suggestion, task or question that you can savor throughout the week.

Start whenever you like. When you order the Calendar Companion, you will receive the next week's calendar companion, along with an introductory email.

$26 for a year's worth of gentle reminders to help you stay aligned with natural rhythms. To order or to see a sample reflection, click here. 

Signs of Summer

The streets in my neighborhood are awash in blooms: magnolias, rhododendrons, camellias, clematis, tulips, daffodils (dying), forsythia (leafing out), quince, cherry trees, plum trees, pieris japonica, bergenias, candytuft, wallflowers, verbenas, forget-me-nots, dandelions, and lots of other plants whose names I don't know. I'm still waiting for the flowers that mark May 1st for me: lilies of the valley, woodruff, lilac and hawthorn. And then my favorites, the bearded iris of May!

What's happening where you live? Do you see any signs of spring yet?

Where ever you live, send me your signs of the season and we will post them at the website at Signs of the Season.

Copyright

Copyright © Waverly Fitzgerald 2009
All rights reserved. You may reprint material from
Living in Season in other electronic or print publications as
long as you credit me and provide a link to:
http://www.schooloftheseasons.com
Please send me a copy of the publication.

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