For centuries, before opening to Western trade and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, Japan used a lunisolar calendar, adopted from China. The four seasons of winter, spring, summer, and autumn were traditionally divided into twenty-four seasons, which were further divided into seventy-two micro-seasons, known as kō, each lasting just five days. I don’t remember where I first encountered the 72 kō calendar, but I’ve been thinking of it lately, especially now that I live so close to nature, where in the quiet of each day I find myself noticing the minute changes in the world around me. Which trees are turning, which trees’ leaves have fallen, the way the liquid chirping of songbirds in the morning has turned to the beckoning caw of crows.
The 72 kō calendar begins in February, after the start of the lunar year, with 立春, or Risshun, the beginning of spring. Each five-day season is described with a poetic line: February 4-8 corresponds to 東風解凍, or “East wind melts the ice.” The micro-seasons all deal with the natural world, some in lines more specific than others. In Rikka, the beginning of summer, from May 5-9, “Frogs start singing.” From June 11-15, “Rotten grass becomes fireflies.”1 The calendar takes note of sprouts, blooms, and witherings, of the movements of animals and of the harvest, that intersection of the tamed and untamed worlds.
Many of the plants mentioned in the traditional Japanese calendar are familiar to most—cherry blossoms and peach blossoms, peonies and chrysanthemums, rice seedlings and bamboo shoots, perhaps even the mulberry leaves upon which the silkworms feast, from May 21 to 25. But one humble plant appears twice in the calendar: the common self-heal, Prunella vulgaris, which is said to sprout in December and wither in June.
I first encountered self-heal in late June, after Katy Simpson Smith’s reading from The Weeds, a reading (and book) which has continued to shape this letter series. She drew our attention to the plants blooming in the meadow, including self-heal, which is often hard to spot, low and close as it grows to the ground. Prunella is a member of the mint family, square-stemmed and sturdy, with two-lipped, tubular purple flowers that grow off a nubby-looking whirled cluster. You can identify it by its tiny, purple flowers, though it’s easy to miss. Like every plant I’ve written about here, once I started noticing self-heal, I started noticing it everywhere—its presence unobtrusive, peeping in the groundcover of forests, sneaking into lawns and the edges of meadows.
Prunella is known as self-heal because of its medicinal properties; other names for the plant include heal-all, woundwort, and heart-of-the-earth. Its Chinese name, 夏枯草, translates to “summer-withering grass,” because it dries in summer.2 The dried flower heads are used in medicine, brewed into teas and steeped into baths; it is said to be anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and antiviral, as well as a pain reliever.
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Last week, I was back in the city for longer than expected. At first I thought, just a few days. Then it was a few more, and then it was over a week. There was a class to teach, a retreat to sit, dinners and lunches, and a flood, nearly biblical in its proportions, that kept us in Brooklyn. When we got home everything had changed, faster than I thought it would; the trees are yellow and orange now, a red shift moving across the landscape. So that was it, I thought; it’s fall, and I wasn’t here to see it.
Here in the States, self-heal blooms later in the year, from June to August. Yesterday, walking through the meadow, I still saw its purple flowers here and there, close to the ground, where it reappears after being mowed over. The rest that has been left to grow is dry now, summer-withered, the stalks stiff and brown like a bottle brush. When touched, the dried flower head feels both sturdy and light; stooping to investigate, I bounced it between finger and thumb, the dry husk rasping against my hand.
I’m always worried that I’ll miss something even as I watch for it. That while I’m gazing elsewhere the meteor will streak across the sky, unobserved; that while I’m away the leaves will turn from green to gold to crimson, and that I’ll miss their zenith, some imagined peak. I am even worried that I am present only for the wrong parts of the sunset, even as I stand on the shore and watch the sun sink into the surface of the lake.
But there is no grand story of my life, no program toward which I can orient myself, only each day and what I notice while living it. Though I have returned, yes, to yellow leaves, and more light penetrating through the stand of trees across the street. Today it is like this; tomorrow it will be different. A ring of mushrooms has sprouted up after the rains; they circle the lawn in front of two tall evergreens. I will watch them as they grow, the caps broadening, turning flat and yellow, speckled with white.
Summer is not the end of autumn; autumn is not the beginning of winter; the end of winter is not spring. I have always loved living in a place with seasons; it’s how I know that time is passing. There are grand ways that I know my life is changing, the all-at-onceness of it, the appearance of things like peonies, and cherries, and crocuses in spring. A dive, a dream, a move. But there are also the smaller shifts and subtleties, the slight changes, ebbs and flows, that call for the naming of seventy-two seasons.
What would it mean—to look that closely?
I am trying to notice everything.
When we first moved to the country, the noise of the insects was so loud that with a window open, we could hardly sleep. It has quieted and quieted, until the only sound these nights is the crickets chirping in the grass.
According to the 72 kō calendar, we are in the middle of the autumn equinox, and just at the very end of the season, 蟄虫坏戸: “Insects hole up underground.”
This time of year, I begin to watch my own mind, my moods like a leaf balanced on water, spinning.
And I am watching for the sunlight, its color in the mornings, how clear and sharp it is through the trees.
Till soon,
LP
Another translation reads: “Fireflies fly out from moist grass.”
Its Japanese name, ウツボグサ, is more recent; its old name, なつかれくさ, comes from the Chinese.