Book: Light Rains Sometimes Fall

Description

“This is a beautiful book … written with a depth of feeling and innate curiosity … a wealth of fascination in the natural world, written by an observer with an intense passion for the natural world around him.” – Tonto Williams, Electronic Scrapbook

If any book can persuade you to see more closely, this is it. – Andres Kabel, Read Listen Watch

This is a book for nature lovers through and through, but perhaps even more so, it is a book that guides you […] to realise that the wonder of nature is so utterly simple to access … Each chapter [is] a veritable conjuring act of textual pleasure … An intelligent, serious piece of nature writing. – Laurence Green, Anime Wondering

In the West we consider the passing of the year through the prism of four seasons. Other cultures see nature’s turn quite differently, however. The traditional Japanese calendar recognises that the subtle changes of the natural world with a total of seventy-two microseasons (kō) – inspiration for a new way of connecting with nature closer to home.

In seventy-two short chapters, Lev Parikian charts the changes that each of these microseason brings to his local patch – garden, streets, park and wild cemetery.

From risshun (the birth of Spring) in early February to daikan (the greater cold) in late January, Lev draws our eye to the exquisite beauty (and mundanity) of the day to day, while also comparing two different perspectives. For Japan’s lotus blossom, praying mantis and bear, we have bramble, wood louse and urban fox. But the rhythms – and the power of nature to reflect and enhance our mood – are the same.

By turns reflective, joyous, sad, melancholy, light-hearted, serious, funny and occasionally absurd, this is both a nature diary and an engaging insight into how nature refuses to fit into our boxes, however large or small.