Great idea! A few thoughts for expansion.

[jeffcressman]

Hi Ross. I really like this idea. I'd love to see it expanded to allow the inclusion of small-seasons for any location.

I had a quick skim of https://rosszurowski.com/log/2018/small-seasons-long-calendars and I think there is some real merit to providing people with the overlay structure of a calendar for looking at the world with fresh eyes. I think most folks pass through the natural world and mostly see it in terms of globs, like 'the park', and quickly lose interest because it appears to only be one thing, when in fact it is a dynamic ever-changing thing. Having something like sekki, where time is broken up into smaller units via association with particular phenomena provides the cues to look, to take notice of an otherwise ignored richness.

I jog relatively regularly and always along the same route. I enjoy the route because there are many trees and bushes that flower at different times throughout the year. If I only went along the route once per standard season I would miss most of what happens.

The internet is amazing but I think it also often puts people's minds far away from their bodies, where they are right now. Some form of expansion on this work feels like it might provide tools to strike more of a balance between being 'here' and 'out there'.

I'm getting ready to go away for a few weeks and haven't really thought any of the following through but the first ideas off the top of my head for expansion include:

• To cover the small seasons in any location it seems to me you'd need the people in that location to provide the content/markers for the seasons
• For collaborating on the content/markers perhaps a voting system could take care of discrepancies as to whether something actually happens at a particular time or not
• It might be nice for people to be able to include/exclude items/lists of things from their 'feed' of the seasons
• I like the idea of getting notifications, like the twitter bot you have, as things happen, a cue to remember to look/act/appreciate. Most notifications seem to want something from you whereas this type of things feels like it's offering you something free of strings.
• I would like the idea of what vegetables/fruit are currently coming into season being part of what I'm made aware of. Perhaps there are many seasonal lists that get built up, by location, that one can subscribe to. I might mostly be interested in what's happening in my city but may also want to be reminded when a particular season happens in a nearby city, like when the almond trees blossom.

[afflick]

Hi @jeffcressman,

I sent Ross an email with some very similar ideas... I think the small seasons in different locations would be a great extension.

The CSIRO has done a lot of work here in Australia with the Indigenous people to develop a number of calendars within the country. It makes sense to start here for content.

Some additional thoughts:

• It would be beneficial to categorise the observation e.g. change in weather, change in plants, change in animal activity
• Some of the seasonal timings of the calendars may not be tied to the European annual 12-month calendar. There are indicators that dictate seasonal change. For example: in the Ngadju ‘calendar', the Ngarnngi (Hot Time) starts when the Mockingbird wakes up the bobtails, goannas, and snakes with its singing as it travels from south to north (about September).
• It would be great to explore some visualisation techniques for seasonal calendars. I'm not a huge fan on how a lot of the Australian Indigenous calendars have been represented in a flat circular style graph. This could potentially be improved by making it more interactive.

[rosszurowski]

Hi! Thanks for these thoughtful write-ups!

I jog relatively regularly and always along the same route. I enjoy the route because there are many trees and bushes that flower at different times throughout the year. If I only went along the route once per standard season I would miss most of what happens.

I like this. I heard once, "the only real reading is re-reading," and perhaps the same is true for our environment.

In my opinion, writing and thinking tools are much more powerful at promoting this kind of noticing than software ones. For a discombobulated-head mind-is-elsewhere computer worker like me, I don't need more apps, reminders, or notifications in my life. What I need is a few beautiful words to widen my awareness and start reading that environment.

(In other words, I'm not personally interested in building elaborate software – notifications, voting – around this idea. Though if you want to build it, I'm happy to link from smallseasons.guide.)

Publishing more localized seasonal calendars, on the other hand, feels like a good way to push this idea forward! (@afflick, thanks for sharing those aboriginal calendars — a neat project). I'll add a separate comment with the full list I know of below.

[rosszurowski]

Seasonal Calendars

• Sekki
• Australian Aboriginal Calendars
• Belarusian Month Names

If you know of, or come across other traditional seasonal calendars, drop them here and I'll add them to the collection. If we can find enough, perhaps a good way to develop the site will emerge.