'Tis the season
We often talk about the different seasons, identifying their characteristics, separating them from the rest of times in the year. We even make up seasons, like the holiday season around Xmas and New Year’s, which stand well defined from any other. But, why do we need to do so? The year is a cycle, a turn of the planet around a star. Both the planet and the star are in constant change, constant movement, so they don’t really care all that much about a couple of bells or a number on a calendar. So, too, is the satellite that rules flows and tides, but which never shows its back. The metamorphoses evident in Nature (alterations in temperature, in foliage, in the number and species of animals around, to name but a few) happen gradually. Indeed, it seems that all that green appears all of a sudden, but the seeds, roots and shoots have been hard at work for months before we get a glimpse of them; the newborns have sometimes taken years to fully gestate; and even as one half of the plane...