I’ve repeatedly run into wheel of the year narratives that encourage us to align our lives with the sun’s cycle. This, we are told, is more natural. We should dream and hibernate in the depths of winter, plant the seeds for our projects in the spring, watch them grow through the summer and take our harvest in the autumn. Never mind that many projects are not shaped like growing grain in the first place.
What do you do if the winter is a depressing time? What do you do if you need the warmth and comfort of sunny days to do your dreaming and planning? What do you do if you work best in the winter, locked away from the world? If your nature doesn’t align you to the solar wheel, how can forcing yourself to fit with it be natural?
Most people are familiar with Dionysus as a vegetation god. In fact, that’s how he started life (so to speak) among humans, dying each year at the time of the grape harvest. In the Mediterranean, where Crete is located, that happens most years in late August or early September. So in many ways Dionysus is similar to the other dying-and-reborn vegetation gods we’re familiar with from the Near East, Europe, and other regions.
But as so often happens, cultures change over time, inventing or importing new ideas and layering them onto what’s already there. Something like that happened with Dionysus in ancient Crete.
Of all life forms, the deciduous tree appears to be the one most in synch with the solar events of the year. Sleeping in winter, budding in spring, resplendent with leaves in the summer, fruiting in the autumn and then back to sleep. There are of course also an assortment of tree calendars (mostly owing to Robert Graves) which put different trees as being prominent at different times. Based on what, exactly, I am seldom sure.
The more time you spend with trees, the less this whole idea of a single wheel of the year narrative for trees holds up. For a start, it only works if you live somewhere that has the kind of climate that delivers summer and winter. You have to have deciduous trees, not pines or cacti. If your seasons are all about wet and dry, the solar year and the tree year are not going to be the same. The solar/tree year is fairly Eurocentric, and will fit anywhere with similar conditions, but not everywhere.
Thanks for your post, Nimue. In Australia, our seasons are not typical, especially when some eucalypts drop their bark and branche
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Thank you SO MUCH for sharing this. It was really helpful for me to read. I think it is good to keep in tune with the cycles of th
