You'll find here, first of all, the most current of my writing, framed in a small newsletter called Ripening Seasons, begun in February of 1995. It was started as a way to resolve the two nagging concerns of my writing life: keeping up with personal correspondence, and finding a readership for the ongoing output of an unquiet, constantly provoked mind.
My resolution to this twin dilemma was a periodical format, six pages of text on whatever concerned me at the moment, together with a cover letter for the personal aspect -- all sized to fit within the postal minimum. It was quite perfect, allowing me every writer's favorite editor (himself), and the support of a market-free selection of favorite readers (his friends). It has seldom failed to bring me pure satisfaction.
If this is your reading pleasure, for the moment, you can head directly to an annotated selection of a goodly number of issues of Ripening Seasons.
There is, however, another and deeper purpose for this meadow section of the site. Among the many themes that have prompted my writing during a quarter-century of societal upheaval and personal rebellion, one alone -- a fresh and more potent view of the seasons -- seems peculiarly my own. It arises from the insights of experience and carefully reviewed life-patterns, insights for which I can find little precedent in the literature of consciousness change, or within the general awareness of both the lay and scientific communities.
It concerns the remarkable influence of the seasons in our lives. The subject is far broader than the extent granted by our ordinary perception, which simply registers the seasons as a part of nature 'out there' in the realm of flora, fauna and weather. The seasons, however, are the pattern of Nature's annual change inside each of us, impacting on both consciousness and personal reality to an extent largely unrecognized.
More remarkably, the year's seasons find their exacting parallel in the stages of a lifetime, and in the changing course of each day in our experience. Some of this is well-known in simile and metaphor -- and, indeed, provides a ready platform for study of the larger phenomenon -- but has seldom served as more than a basis for poetry or idle whimsy. Yet, these seasonal analogies argue persuasively for the consideration of a heretofore undesignated Jungian archetype: the seasonal cycle as an internalized motif for passing time.
Once this is grasped, and change is experienced in such a framework, a whole range of insights begin to come in, and the three familiar chronologies of this cyclic pattern (day, year and lifetime) come to be a kind of Rosetta Stone, for each reveals aspects of the essential archetype that stand out with greater clarity in one particular time-frame of reference or another. Once the pattern is fully clear, it augments our understanding of each of the three time-frames (and conceivably others), as never before realized.
I've had to learn these things almost entirely on my own, from what life has taken me through. But this has given me an exceptionally privileged view, for there is a Reality in life, itself, that book learning can't approach. But for the very reason that it has been an experiential trail, I've written about it in fragments and slices, as warranted by the tale I happen to be telling at the time. The complete and properly organized book it seemed to point me toward was something always in the future.
Well, there has been a partial remedy for that. With the late-life opportunity to complete my schooling, there came also a chance to do a part of the study that seemed a necessary preliminary to any such thoroughgoing portrayal: a search for what might be discoverable, on these matters, in the text and lore of other cultures, worldwide and among all the early peoples of which we have extant record. I spent much of my final school year (1989-90) on it, and was well rewarded for the effort -- in terms of support for my perceptions and conjectures.
The thesis was never published, for it wasn't directed toward a higher degree. It merely sat and languished on a department office shelf through most of the subsequent decade. But at long last, it is here on this site, for any who care to pursue the topic.
Without further delay of introduction, I invite you to get right into it...
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