Mid Adar 1 Reflections
We are entering the time of transition from winter to spring. The daffodils are poking their heads out of the ground, the onion grass has started to grow, and I even saw a crocus in half open state. At the same time, the morning still feels like winter and the trees are all brown and grey sticks against the sky. The grass is still brown, the floor of wooded areas is covered with leaves and the birds are pretty much quiet. Yet we have the occasional warmer day where the male woodpeckers drum against the trees calling for a mate and other birds chirp at each other back and forth. While we have had only one day like that in the past two weeks, I expect we’ll have more than that in the next two weeks. A few days from now, I will be sitting outside after a night when it only got down to forty, and I expect it to feel and sound a lot more like spring.
This all feels like a normal merging of winter into spring. When I do these reflections based on secular months, here in the mid-Atlantic, March is winter into spring, and we enter March this week. We are ancy for spring to come, our bodies longing to shed the coats and sweaters of winter, to feel a stronger sun on our face, to be able to dig our toes into the grass without freezing out tootsies off.
I want to look at two kinds of agricultural practices that see humans attempting to get a jump start on spring. It is hard to wait.
When I was raising cattle, farmers would absolutely be in the midst of calving as we approach the end of February. Why would they be calving in the winter you ask? It’s really simple. Cow-calf farmers by definition sell all of their male calves to feedlots in the fall so that they don’t have to feed them stored feed such as hay, silage or baleage. The bigger the calves come October, the more money they get. So they are willing to have the cows calve in the unpredictable conditions of late winter in order to have heavier calves come October.
This is a perfect example of how not to work with the more than human world. First, with proper grass management, they should be able to graze into November or December, assuming a decent amount of rain. Second, calving in winter can lead to calves freezing to death or being weakened if it is extremely cold, or being all stuck in mud if it is an unusually warm winter because the grass isn’t growing to grow in February unless you are in the south—period. Third, you really stress the momma cows, because here they are producing milk and usually eating hay which simply doesn’t have the nutrients that fresh grass does—especially when you time your hay cutting for maximum tonnage rather than higher quality hay, as is common.
What these farmers don’t know how to do, what we as a society have no clue how to do, is to work with the seasons as they unfold.
There’s also a long history of vegetable and flower growers starting early by starting plants in some kind of altered climate such as inside a heated building or in a kind of protected structure. I get this, because if we are eating seasonally, we are a bit tired of the stored potatoes, carrots and squash, or the few vegetables that can survive the winter in these gentle climes of the mid-Atlantic (I ate kale harvested from my garden for dinner). Lettuce, cucumber, a juicy tomato, snap peas that aren’t frozen, these sound like something good and I can feel my body craving them. I get this, and yet I wonder what we would learn spiritually if we would let the seasons unfold at their own speed.
QUESTIONS
What lessons could you learn by sitting with what is, rather than attempting to manipulate it for your own goals?
On the other hand, what situations impact you that are excused by the phrase “that’s just the way it is” that should be changed?
What feels out of synch in your life?
