My essay “A Circling Story,” published at Emergence Magazine, is on this week’s Longreads Top 5 list.
Krista Stevens at Longreads writes:
“Spring, summer, fall, and winter: Amid each, sometimes it’s easy to forget that change is ongoing, if sometimes imperceptible. I try my best to mark seasonal changes: I love hearing ‘bird radio’ get louder as spring unfolds, when robin dads sing evening songs to ward off other males. Their voices go silent in late August, and that sudden void reminds me that fall will soon arrive. In this piece for Emergence Magazine, Holly Haworth notes that the ‘Japanese have seventy-two microseasons, traditionally, each lasting around five days.’ Their names include: ‘bamboo start to sprout,’ ‘praying mantises hatch,’ ‘distant thunder,’ and ‘frogs start singing.’ Haworth’s ode to the seasons reads like a poem. In simple yet vibrant declarative sentences, she reminds us what we stand to gain by getting outside and observing closely. Sometimes paying attention can be draining, but for Haworth, the act energizes and fulfills her as an antidote to climate change. ‘This is why I have been turning my attention toward the seasons so devotedly these past many years, keeping my field notebooks,’ she writes. ‘[To] draw myself closer to the earth’s cycles whose disruption is, in fact, the most important story of our time…’ I read this piece just after Daylight Savings Time ended. With full darkness now at 5 p.m., it’s helped me to welcome the shorter days. It’s a lyrical reminder that fallow periods are so important for the earth and for humans, that fall decay and winter stillness are necessary, if only to help us better appreciate the light when it finally returns.”
So much gratitude to Longreads for reading my work.