In this second episode of our seasons conversation series, Volume 6 contributors David G. Haskell and Dara McAnulty explore how our senses shape myriad experiences of the seasons, some collective and some deeply personal. Finding wonder in the symbolism of daffodils in spring, carnivals of pollen-dusted black bees, and the feeling of joy tinged with grief as familiar seasonal moments return each year altered, David and Dara invite us to open our eyes, ears, and hearts to the celebration that lives within the seasons.

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This week, Diné poet Jake Skeets brings us into the rising dust, big sky, and bent light of summers on the Navajo Nation, and explores how the body is not separate from the seasons, rather one of the many terrains upon which they play out. Now living amid excessive heat warnings, sandstorms, and wildfire haze that test his love of the summer, Jake asks how such extremes will reshape our intimate and ancestral relationship with the seasons.

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Image Credit: Evelyn Dragan / Connected Archives

For Christian mystic Thomas Merton, the sacred and the profane were continuous: all was alive with divine presence. Stands of redwoods were his cathedral, the sky, birds, and wind were his prayers, and the silence of the forest his lover. This week, we return to an essay by Fred Bahnson, who follows Merton’s 1968 pilgrimage to the American West as he travels to Redwoods Monastery and Christ in the Desert Monastery. Guided by Merton’s contemplation and seeking the same solitude, Fred discovers anew the ways God runs through both land and heart.

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Photo by Thomas Merton.

Can we learn from more-than-human beings how to bring our bodies into a more direct conversation with the seasons? In this week’s story, bioethics and history researcher Melanie Challenger explores how our culture insulates us from experiencing seasonal signals in the natural world, ultimately impeding our ability to respond to ecological change. Examining how animals and plants translate important shifts in the land into meaningful activity, Melanie reflects on what it would take for humans to reawaken the same attunement to the changes, great and small, unfolding around us.

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Photo credit: Credit: Alex Strohl / Verb Photo

This week, author and poet CMarie Fuhrman listens to the forest speak its old stories through the roll of thunder, the river emptied of salmon, and the howl of wolves in Idaho’s remote Frank Church Wilderness. In these sounds and silences, she remembers the people and knowledge that colonial history has tried to erase. Recognizing herself as a “person of ground,” she contemplates the past as something that we can call forth into the present, and memory as moving in the opposite direction of prayer—down into the Earth.

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Photo by Luca Werner

In a season of loss, how does absence offer a greater understanding of presence? This week, Terry Tempest Williams brings us into her love affair with Utah’s Great Salt Lake, a place that nourishes twelve million migrating birds, bison herds, and deep-rooted human communities, and which is now in retreat. Contemplating how we might be in service to this dying lake, Terry summons us to be present with the losses in the landscape.

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Photo by Christina Seely

Depicting a distant age in which river guardians, mothmen, and condor trackers strive to protect a dying world, novelist Lydia Millet asks whether we can navigate species loss not through visions of saviors, but through patient devotion to what might yet emerge through care. Amid extreme temperatures and invasive insects, this short story follows a team of caretakers who track, feed, and hatch the clutches of “the old ones”—ancient desert tortoises nearing extinction.

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Credit: Daniel Farò / Connected Archives

For plants, the moment of spring emergence is the gamble of their lives, says journalist Zoë Schlanger. They rely on a convergence of genetic instructions from within and environmental cues from without to know when it is time to bring new life into the world. But what happens when seasonal markers and a plant’s molecular memory, shaped by generations of winters, no longer agree? Seeing this increasing tension between timelines reflected in her own journey toward parenthood, Zoë asks how we can steward a world where the fragile conversations between biological clocks are being rewritten.

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Photo by Sam Laughlin.