Seasons of Seattle is a series of dinner parties that will serve as time-marking seasonal rituals.
I am inspired by a common neo-pagan festival sequence called the Wheel of the Year, which divides the year into 8 time marking celebrations.
While useful, the Wheel of the Year is often tinged with the Celtic revival motifs that inform neo-paganism. While rooted in the seasons, they do not directly correlate to ours in the Pacific Northwest.
With Seasons of Seattle, I hope to return to a Wheel of the Year designed for our place and our year.
Season Cycle Dinners:
Over the last couple years I have been digging into my own personal project of seasonal noticing. Now I need more eyes and ears around the city to truly dig into what the seasons look like in Seattle.
That’s where you all, my lovely nature spies, come in—I hope! In exchange for yummy dinners.
Starting with Mid-Autumn just after Halloween, I’ll throw a series of dinner parties to mark these intervals. I’d love if you could come! I’m enlisting you in my project of seasonal observation.
Here’s how we’ll do it:
Eight Seasonal Waypoints…
I have marked out eight seasonal waypoints that fall every 6-ish weeks or so, and give me an excuse to see all of your lovely faces at a regular interval. While I really do want to hear what you all see out in the world, my real motive here is to mark time with people I care about.
The eight waypoints are the solstices, equinoxes, and the exact midpoints between each of them. Learn more here.
…Marked by a Dinner Party…
As the season progresses, Jon and I will invite you to a dinner to mark the holiday, probably on a Friday or Saturday. We’ll make everyone a seasonally relevant dinner with as much locally grown stuff as we can manage.
…where we’ll share seasonal observations.
In the week leading up to our dinner, I’ll prompt you by text to pay especially close attention to the natural world around you:
- What is the season doing?
- What’s the weather like?
- What do you notice about local plants this week—where are they at in their cycles?
- What interesting animal encounters have you had?
- What’s your internal experience of this moment in the year—are you thinking retrospectively, or forward to the future? Are you feeling depressed or energized? What are your traditional and personal associations with this time of the year?
This can go in any direction you’re drawn in—I mostly just want us all to mark this moment in the year by noticing.
While we eat, we’ll share our recent observations about the season, both in terms of our nature viewing and in terms of our own psyches and experiences. I’ll probably write some stuff down so that I can start building an understanding of our seasons through you all.
Samish 13 Moons: A PNW Seasonal Round
Part of the reason settlers in this region feel so separate from seasons is loss of knowledge about local Indigenous seasonal rhythms as part of colonial erasure.
The Samish Indian Nation put together this incredible StoryMap about the 13-moon Samish seasonal cycle. I’ll be referring to this and other Seasonal Rounds throughout the project—please check it out!
Seasons of Seattle 