Fall Samhain Moon
Interesting convergence. In Ovid today I translated some verses about the silver age in which Jupiter created four seasons from summer, brief spring, winter and autumn. After finishing this work, I went out and joined Kate, already at work in the garden. Small pellets of snow fell.
(The Close of the Silver Age by Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1527-35)
We went into the orchard. Kate pulled back the landscape cloth around the remaining trees while I broadcast the fertilizer, sprayed with biotill and then worked them both into the top three inches of soil. While she replaced the landscape cloth, I shoveled soil, mostly sand, back into two large holes dug by our energetic girls, Vega and Rigel.
At one moment I looked up at a tall Norway pine and felt a kinship with Ovid and those farmers in long ago Latium. We had similar things to do at similar times of year.
The word annum popped up from today’s translating. You know, I imagine, that it translates as year, but you might not know that its primary meanings are: a circuit, circular course, periodical return. In one sense this is obvious of course, but that term we use frequently could orient us not to linear time, as we tend to use it, but to cyclical time.
When I say, I am 66 years old, we tend to think, oh. Born 66 years from this date. But that’s not what it really means. It really means I have experienced a full year 66 times. The year itself, if we’re true to its Latin roots, is not a one after the other marker of chronos, but a complete set, 4 seasons here in the temperate latitudes, finished and done with each winter, begun anew each spring. Or whenever you want to break beginning and ending.
We then start over again. Another year as we often say. Yes, just so. Another year. This time in the next year I’ll be fertilizing the orchard. As I have this year. So that moment of apocalypse when the earth becomes changed and brand new? Spring. When the earth becomes desolate and barren? Late fall. Happened before, will happen again. Amen.
