SELECTIONS FROM FM GALICIA

19.11

Anyone who has witnessed winter, spring, summer and autumn will never see anything radically new.

The seasons exist in order to never bore us—that is why we forget about them so quickly. Over a certain period of time, the traits of the previous season are erased and the upcoming year’s autumn will turn out to be as poignant as last year’s.

But the seasons require attention. We can’t just treat the highly refined changes that occur between the seasons as shifting weather pat­terns—it became cold, it became wet or otherwise unpleasant in some way.

We act superficially. Even our language demonstrates such inatten­tiveness. Arabs possess several dozen words that correspond to shades in the color of sand. Just for sand. While Eskimos know a hundred different words that describe the various states of snow—color, hard­ness, pliancy. They don’t have the word “snow.” Their language has equivalents for one word, for example, “morning, shiny snow, which is difficult to walk upon because it is hard on top and deep underneath”— this is all just one word. And this constitutes being attentive to one’s surroundings. And when we’re trying to be poetic, we say—the leaves have yellowed, the yellow leaves. But can they be so uniform? Can they really just be yellow? And can they be the same yellow when on the tree, when falling, and when on the ground? And, when on the ground, don’t they change color depending on whether they lie separately or are gathered in a pile, or whether they have been lying for a few minutes or several days and nights? And what if there has been frost or rain?

And autumn is not just defined by the shades of leaves. It has countless other characteristics. The fact that they have been forgotten does not mean that they shouldn’t be seen and that we shouldn’t try to remember them. There is no truer method for organizing one’s every­day life than wisely adhering to phenology—to the flow of changes in the seasons. If you implement this methodology, you needn’t worry about your mind—it will be free of confusion. And now everything that you do will contain that special joy of making sense. Food will be better, dreams more interesting, wine more healing. You need to just sense winter, spring, summer, and autumn flowing through you.

Translated by Mark Andryczyk