Sometimes the sun is out, and sometimes in goes in. When it is out, we all smile and are happy to see it. When it goes in and stays in for days on end, we are not happy. Then like today when the sun is in with patches of blue sky there is a sense of promise in the air. Of hope the blue will get bigger and those dark grey skies over there – will not come over here and dump their clammy contents. Today grey skies with blue patches. Small ones. No rain to speak of.
Especially at this time of year, and on through the darkening days of December and January/February/March, there is a real tendency to be adversely affected by the low levels of light. I am. I’ve a little box which pumps out light of the right kind and I sit with it each day to bump up my daily light dosage. No, I probably don’t have S.A.D. in a clinical sense however that extra light does help my poor brain to look lively when it would rather lay down and hibernate. Until spring time.
Walking out among the fields and remote farm houses today in the dim light I wonder, now, about the people from long ago. Hard lives, truly grim lives. They made this landscape, huge chunks of it anyway. I’m thinking that perhaps the human response to weather, the ups, the downs hasn’t changed much. Just like the response of plants and vegetation to changing conditions, it’s chemical a lot of it, I presume.
But where am I going with this? Oh, perhaps a thought about the rhythm of the seasons and how our indoor lives, predominately so for most, has us like plants growing under artificial conditions. A life in eternal sunshine! All the same I have the feeling we are still deeply effected by the seasons, the weather, and all manner of more subtle influences known and unknown. Lets face it nothing happens in isolation from anything else.
And I am now going to cut and run before I drown in my own ignorance. I am not carrying a banner of any kind today, just a love of our land and all that makes it.
Many thanks to my friends who walked out under grey skies with me this day and kept a smile in their hearts.