February 3: Cross-quarter days
We’ve gotten past about the longest January I think I can remember. The cold, the snow, the dreadful events impossible for any decent person to turn away from. The resultant grief. Offering support to those caught in this vortex of cruelty and violence visited on so many by the government is necessary—and somehow not enough. And yet. Just the other day I noticed that it was still light at 5 pm. Surprise! The dark post-solstice January pause is over; suddenly we’re at the cross-quarter days.
I say days advisedly: we are halfway between the solstice and the spring equinox, but measurement, like everything else I’ve ever heard of, depends on your perspective. Time, day and season depend on where you are, which calendar you use, even which astronomical calculations. St. Brigid's day is February 1, and Groundhog Day is, of course, February 2, as is Candlemas. These are based on the Gregorian calendar, and are not quite the same as Imbolc, which traditionally is calculated according to the moon, but is often celebrated according to the solar cycle for convenience. This year it is February 3—at least in the UK, so would that make it almost February 4, more or less here in the Midwest? And then there is the Japanese festival of Setsubun, which can fall on February 2, 3, or 4 (because of the lunar calendar). This year on February 3. The internet informs me that people throw beans to drive away bad luck. Good-bye winter, welcome spring.
But the solar cross-quarter days are also a little fuzzy. There are two astronomical calculations--one of which takes into account the variable speed of the earth as it orbits farther from and closer to the sun—which yield two measures, depending on your math.
So, days, then. This first week of February, this time of turning. At National Grove Woods by the Des Plaines River, frozen, snowed over, laced with deer tracks, the red-bellied woodpeckers have suddenly started reasserting their territorial presence. The tree tops all around and across the river are looking a little blurry—buds are swelling, the maples and elms are getting ready to release their pollen—which means that despite the cold, their flowers are already developing. Suddenly the maple outside my window has sent out what look like little threads from the tips of its branches, seemingly overnight, but at least certainly this week, which will develop into the tiny male flowers.
Along with the dates, conditions are also intensely variable. In Norfolk, England, my friends are chitting their seed potatoes: they’ve nestled cut pieces in egg cartons in a chilly upstairs room in front of a window so they can sprout properly. Here, winter still holds sway, for a little while longer at least. Just the other day, my friends and I sowed the last of the fall-collected wild native seeds in the newly cleared area by the river to ensure good cold stratification in the variable conditions before true spring. The delicate-seeming, tough little packets of living tissue lay on the snow, light as dust. Some will get eaten, but some will melt down to the ground, as the snow does, ready to germinate when conditions allow.
Cross-quarter days, indeed. Everywhere in the northern hemisphere, there’s more daily light, enough to remind us that the earth, sun, solar system and the universe beyond, hold us all within their complex framework of interactions. They cradle and give shape to the tiny gatherings of energy, with their emergent processes, which we call ourselves, our lives.
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February 6: Cold weather
Less than two weeks ago, the polar vortex was sending deadly ice across the south, and keeping the Chicago area well enclosed in snowy, windy, very cold days. My habit is to take a walk after supper. In winter it is a lovely time to traverse the empty streets, last month so cold that even the dogs and their human companions had largely stayed inside and car traffic was down. These winter evening walks have their own rewards—the beauty of the snow, the quiet, the chance to do a little walking meditation, the lamps turned on in windows, making the houses look like massive old sailing ships anchored in some sheltered harbor. The large oaks, hackberries, maples, basswoods, and even a few mighty elms in the neighborhood stand forth in their deep-winter guise, and one is somehow more conscious of them, or at least in a different way, as one is conscious of wooden pillars arrayed throughout the shadowy Tadao Ando-designed room I visit on occasion. Of course, when there, one is meant to think of trees, I guess.
One evening, a poem:
Evening Walk
Dry leaves clatter across hard snow
A man’s low voice floats
From out of a back porch
Nearer home, unlatched gate swings
Open, shut, open again
Then one gray afternoon, I was sitting in my (chilly) sun porch where I often work, staring out at the snow obscuring the houses across the alley.
Another poem:
Afternoon Pause
Koan rests like a stone on my head
My back neighbor plays his drums;
Syncopated echoes ripple out from his large old house
Even past the storm windows—oh—
Snow falling, still air, drumming, stone silence
***
February 9: Will there be another ice age?
Today it has actually reached above freezing for the first time in weeks. During the cold days, coldest and snowiest we’ve had in about five years, the peregrinations of the jet stream got me to wondering about Earth’s one million-year-old ice age, and the present interglacial period in which we humans are flourishing, this 11,7000-year (more-or-less) human-sheltering, warm, Holocene Epoch. What news of the cooling off period we should be approaching, according to the current stages of three long solar system cycles involving Earth’s orbit and position in space? These cycles, lasting between 10,000 and 400,000 years, operate in a coordinated pattern, interacting with changes in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans to bring glaciated periods every 100,000 years (90,000 years of ice increasing, 10,000 years of melting). A glacial period could start in about 11,000 years.
But these days, it’s said that that human-caused global heating has the very real potential to delay any kind of cooling cycle, not to mention re-glaciation, no matter how small an amount. OK, so not on time, then? What about later? Could Earth’s natural inclinations still prevail, despite humans’ best efforts?
Yes, indeed, they can and likely will (hypothetically). The causes of glacial periods have eluded full explanation, and continue to, but this winter, as unusually warm polar air was beginning to destabilize the jet stream, a new study was published in Science, demonstrating how unusually warm-to-hot periods in earth’s long history have heightened carbon-sequestration amounts, tipping the planet relatively rapidly into cool-down mode.
Basically, most CO2 sequestration in the ocean occurs as a result of rock weathering, in which rain water full of CO2 dissolves rocks. The mixture of water, CO2 and minerals ends up in the ocean. There the carbon combines with calcium from the rocks to become things like shells and coral reefs, locking away carbon for hundreds of millions of years. Warmer temperatures speed this process up. However, something else happens as well. The study’s co-authors have now found that as temperatures warm and more nutrients such as phosphorus enter the ocean via rain and weathering, plankton, already present in large numbers, begin to procreate on overdrive. They have always played their own part in carbon sequestration as they absorb CO2 through photosynthesis, sequestering the carbon when they die and sink to the bottom. As they proliferate in ever more huge numbers, however, they reduce available oxygen, which re-releases the phosphorus, enabling ever more plankton to grow and sequester ever more CO2.
Enough carbon is pulled out the air to reduce the greenhouse effect, helping generate a cooling-down leading to the next ice age. Of course, by that time, however many thousands of years in the future, mass extinctions will likely have taken place, and the oceans, I imagine, would resemble a kind of dead, under-oxygenated plankton soup, familiar to us in the global dead zones, such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico.
So yes, eventually, the earth will compensate for our large, deadly experiments with the living systems on which we depend. As the cliché goes, nature always bats last and the earth will be fine, one way or another--but as for humans as well as all the other species we are currently working against? We have created some dangerous territory for ourselves. All of us are co-creating the future through our thoughts and actions. What kind of future do we, and importantly, do each one of us envision? What kind of present and future do we want for ourselves, our families, our descendants and for all other species on which we depend to make this world a deeply complex, comfortable place to live? I for one intend to keep doing what I can to help reduce global heating, to help my local ecosystem thrive, and also to help my human community flourish. For me, the present and future I dream of is one where children can grow up without fear of being terrorized by masked, armed thugs, where they can breathe clean air, drink clean water, eat well, play safely and go to school unafraid, one where they and their families can live in thriving communities that are nestled within the great, flourishing, biodiverse natural systems of the earth.
Related Posts:
The Cherry Tree Dilemma: Mindfulness, Complexity and Traditional Ecological Knowledge. How should we treat the land where we live?
30x30, Rules of Thumb, and the Laws of Nature. Other species need space and habitat.
January Notes: Making Peace with Our Ancestors. Thinking about how to be a better ancestor by grappling with one's own historical legacy.
Constructing Hope: A Discussion of "Green Earth." Kim Stanley Robinson offers ways to think about the future.
Resources:
University of California - Riverside. "Global warming could trigger the next ice age." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 21 December 2025. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/12/251221043231.htm>
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