I live in Scandinavia where the changes of the seasons are clearly felt and are very visible. All seasons here have their charm; we have all heard that said a few times. As well as the words about that the season we prefer mostly are the one we were born in, that could be for some… My seasons of choice, or choices, are the late autumn and the first half of winter. In general I like to overdress myself, cover myself a bit, and I like being active just a little bit to keep my temperature.

In my teens and a bit further on, I lived in the center of towns and very rarely went out to visit any forests. I found the seasons in the towns I lived in to be a nuisance and the summer was mostly too hot and dusty, all the winters were too cold and dark, ice annoyed me when it was hard to walk as it had been snowing and then frozen with hundreds of people walking it rough and rugged…

I always look at trees, any tree I will glance at with an aesthetic mind. The ugly buildings everywhere and all the sick people are painful to my eyes, but trees and their changing will always soothe me. It took some time to really get to know nature again, through the years after been cut off from being one with nature. I felt that nature was just not paying off any effort given in material goods, I pretended that I didn’t need any kind of spiritual connection in the pitiful life I had… I have since then lived secluded and very close to nature for many years, walking and taking photographs and enjoying the different seasons as they enter and leave; to the point that I actually got bored of it all. Still, it is in my senses and I live with the seasons.

LET ME SEARCH FOR FOUR-LEAF CLOVERS

Let me be in all the days

where wild strawberries are attached to straw,

where lilies of the valley gleam white in the glades

and my chanterelles glow yellow from the groves

Let me search for four-leaf clovers

Let me gladly drown the sorrow

and become the real in me

Let me inoculate a leaf on a three-leaf clover

Let me create four-leaf clovers!

LET ME!

Remaining here was this heart

in its anciently dormant well

to retrieve, open and carry

Raising myself

Letting me newkiss the wetlands’ sun-warmed cloudberries

in the wilderness where the deer’s dances nightly with elks

while these stars in this night are set guard over the sparks

and the rowan berries solemnly sail across the forest lakes

Raising myself

It takes a while before the veils bend down

Gone

are dusted membranes

*

In all my four poetry books I’ve had a theme that runs through all the seasons. And, I lived within the changes in the seasons for around twenty years. I needed to stand in; to live in each season to know it and then embrace it into myself for love, comfort and Knowledge. I truly did sense the nature and its seasons change: The flowering of the almond-trees and the taste of wild strawberries, the autumn-leaves falling beneath painted skies, all of life in its different shades and aspects, the gentle flower-filled meadow in the summer. Then again, the beauty in the seasons through nature is far from everything that holds value in Life, but in this world today, many minds clearly lack the ability to be one with nature.

WINDSIDES

Living merely in my autumn leaves, watercourses and clouds,

like a kissed harvest pulled by longings silenced promises

and as unwillingly begged, hard nightflowered and teared

The forest sun-striated (Dreamed in Life’s Windsnare)

meanwhile the raining leaned in slowly, hesitent steps

(Watching melting, hectically dripping under springsun’s might)

In stonelee will soon the violets be placed harrowed here again

and then fade, shyly slouch, under the night-time’s journey

(Enough about that.)

Stepping up a daily route and got beautiful together with dawning

and when later the rain carefully fell asleep weary beside the dusking

down under raking forest tree tops underneath the greyspeckled skies

was springs-ground seen turning home to barrenly (and slowly) thaw drinking

Gazing miles wide around over the halfway snow stained mounds

where furrowed fields stood silent as frozen, stopped sea waves,

while the Winds hit, took headway from all four sides, then suddenly!:

At precisely the right time beams of the Sun broke in over the district

The springtender light lit carefully (Warmed the last years grass)

and little shadows flickered themselves quickly over creek and river

I have eye-caressed the pinebedded grounds fairest days

before nocturnal fog arose around tender forestshadows

Beneath rainpines’ dripping greeted my sight modest flowering,

together with the rain teared down with most broken branches

Indulgent crop on sweet forest ploughed strips, stay here.

*

I know that the two poems above are quite loaded with imagery, and that was part of the point and perhaps their sole strength when I wrote them a few years back. It is a pressing on, a forcing down of an overload of images, to compress the beauty I saw and wanted and then stressing that very beauty against the senses. We all have to live without that much beauty being present in everything, and we also need to fill ourselves with a clear understanding of what beauty in nature through the seasons give to our lives. Or, we will have next to nothing in our life outside ourselves and egoism when we live in this world. Seasons? I’m all in for it.

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