People close to me joke that on june 22nd I already start getting seasonally depressed because the days are getting shorter again. Now it’s the end of august and I wake up when it’s dark. That marks the beginning of autumn to me. Spring is my season, autumn most definitely isn’t. When september approaches, D. rejoices: her season is beginning and she’s energetic, full of plans: student’s to teach, mini-plays to write for her primary school literacy classes. Not me: I start thinking ahead to awful december, when nightfall is at 4PM. There used to be a time, and it lasted three years, when I would leave home in the dark and return in the dark. Those months, every year, were difficult to bear. Last year, in Sweden, people spontaneously brought up their seasonal depression in casual conversation. I suppose it is stronger in Scandinavia; it may explain something of the palpable sense of melancholy. Yet it was also in Sweden, last year november, that I saw that it is possible to live with short days, by lighting fires, spending time outdoors and moving with the season instead of against it. And here we punctuate autumn and winter by means of ceremony and sitting at the stove in the ger. In November, I will lead another lodge and it will be possible to retreat a little, in Wesepe.
Entirely unrelated to this is that yesterday night I watched a documentary on the Scots percussionist Evelyn Glennie. It was a great film, mostly because of the fact that it was completely full of sounds. And she said a few very insightful things about sensory hearing. In the documentary she was teaching a deaf student percussion. And as she explained the process of hearing with the body, she said: “if you feel the sound, you will perceive it long after the audience has stopped hearing it. So, you see, we actually hear more than hearing people.” That sort of hit me. Because over the last few days I’ve often thought that while viewfindering, I actually see more than seeing people. I found a TED talk in which Glennie explains sensory hearing. Here it is.