Practice in low, distracted times

Seventy-Two Seasons: A Memoir About Noticing
by M.A.C. Farrant  

Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2026 
$22.95 / 9781553807438

Reviewed by Trevor Carolan

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Northeast Asia’s traditional rice-growing cultures have long acknowledged a larger subset of 24 agriculturally or nature-attuned seasons of 15-16 days each, beyond our customary four. From the “Beginning of Spring” (Ris-shun) on Feb. 4^th, the 24 Seasons acknowledge such natural phenomena as the arrival of heat, dew, frost, varying degrees of daylight, and so on, through to “Great Frost” (Tai-kan) on Jan. 21, usually near the start of the next lunar year.

About ten years ago, popularized through the practice of Mindfulness, word began travelling in English of a further Japanese concept of there being 72 micro-seasons during the year, each of five days length. Derived from the larger 24 Seasons, the micro-seasons are linked with China’s lunar-solar calendar. In her new book, MAC Farrant, one of Canada’s more canny writers engages with the notion of 72 seasons by noting an article from The Guardian a while back that proposed, “we should focus our attention on a particular feature of nature for a short period of time and, in doing so, stay present long enough to notice incremental changes.” The key words, she notes mindfully, are “stay present.”

The specific teaching of Mindfulness itself was introduced to Western culture by Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who whilst living in exile had been approached by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for insight into Gandhi’s principles of ahimsa, or non-violence which would become an inspiring force in the US civil rights struggle. When Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of socially Engaged Buddhism began drawing attention in North America in the late 1980s, among his US disciples were University of Massachusetts Medical School professor Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Arne Kotler, founder and longtime director of Parallax Press near Berkeley that published Thich Nhat Hanh’s many books. Kabat-Zinn’s particular contribution was to de-emphasize Mindfulness from Buddhism in which it is a key meditative tenet. Kotler has noted how during editorial planning for the publication of Thich Nhat Hanh’s best-selling book Being Peace, Kabat-Zinn proposed replacing the monk’s use of the term “Buddhism” with “Mindfulness” to make the teachings more accessible to American readers. This worked like a charm, spawning a movement that nowadays offers courses and workshops, with even politicians and police officers routinely referencing the term.  

In her introduction, Farrant observes that she has pragmatically “taken the notion of seventy-two seasons as a useful practice for noticing, with the aim of enlarging [her] experience of the natural world by learning to stay spellbound and present in it.” In our current age of maximum consumerist distraction, intentionally tracking small but steady changes in the space around us sounds a sensible pursuit. Farrant explains that she has consciously adopted the practice of disciplined “noticing” in the fashion of “a pilgrim heading towards the holy font of deep nature.” Coming from a family that, she concedes, “didn’t camp, fish, hike or even go for walks, and so had no close association with nature,” her brief, year-long reports from 72 mindful encounters with the natural world serve as barometric readings from her search for “an antidote” to what she candidly refers to as a personal case of “post-industrial self-absorption.”  

Most of us have personal seasonal demarcations. Late January snowdrop and crocus time, spring berry-picking, cherry-munching season, first heavy fall rains that bring shorter daylight, and so on. Farrant mentions that her husband calls his harvesting in late-July “Garlic Season.”

Nature has always been celebrated in art and literature. Wordsworth’s Romantic poet chums, the French Impressionist painters and their heirs, the unsurpassably nature-literate Tang, and later poets and watercolourists from China and Japan—all worked from an ethos where, as Farrant describes, nature is “regarded as a place of transcendence.” What draws us to such work, she intuits, is the deeper nature of the “noticing” involved. From this we absorb a deeper awareness of each thing, with an additional awareness too of what we are progressively losing.

Micro-seasons are an opportunity, she reckons, “to fully behold something in particular before moving on to a new focus.” These short episodes are more manageable than the longer periods of seasonal change we’re accustomed to. In this, she considers Buddhism’s fundamental awareness of “the illusion of separation”— or in plain language how the Buddha’s first teaching of paticca samutpada explains how the secret of the universe is that everything is connected.

Farrant picks on the connection in Japan’s Zen Buddhist tradition between noticing and waiting. Reaching back further yet, she points to China’s ancient Taoist oracle the I Ching with its emphasis on patience, and on finding harmony within the timing of notable changes. This attention to noticing has memorable forebears.  Allen Ginsberg used to teach that the heart of his poetic methodology rests on the practice of “Aesthetic Mindfulness.”  As he often explained, “Notice what you notice—what you see when you see it, what you hear when you hear it. Write it down.” Farrant sees that deep noticing is a unique, dynamic form of meditation and that the value in seeing more sharply is that she can find herself, “drawn into unexpected and surprising directions I never would have considered exploring.”

A string of such discoveries leads her to research a diverse, ecologically-attuned cluster of subjects that she notices such as dandelions—their lifespan, useful applications, and remarkable root-length (up to 15 inches). Then on to clover with reminders from her childhood years of its tasty pleasures, and a leap into sentient critters like the Wall Lizard, now slinking its way, she tells us, to widespread notoriety throughout the Saanich Peninsula—its lifecycle, predatory habits, and of those that prey on it. A brief essay on rats allows Farrant to click into prose overdrive and rev up the comic persona that she’s known for. Packing in half a dozen colloquial refs that morph on the fuller dimension of rat-ology—ratty hairdos, not giving a rat’s ass, double-crossing rats, what have you, she seals the deal about humans and rats. I don’t know of another writer these days as skilled in this grammatical regard. 

Other subject-specific chapters—on crows, the humble bulrush and cornflowers, hay, and blue spruce get the editorial close-eye treatment and move her narrative along. Portmanteau encounters with other writers—there are plenty—feature as well: Mary Oliver, Chuang-tzu, Alan Watts, Marcus Aurelius, Pablo Neruda, and David Abrams are brought in, and each thickens the soup. John Gray’s maxim is paraphrased: “The good life is not the one we want but that in which we are fulfilled.” There’s a wonderful synopsis of how Antonio Vivaldi came to compose his unforgettable suite The Four Seasons, and a thumbnail sketch on Oregon’s Ken Kesey inadvertently inventing the Sixties Counterculture.  It’s a jam-packed compendium with a lot of wisdom to share.

The Bloomsbury Review, one of the best popular book journals there ever was used to publish poignant vignettes about seeing closely, calling them “Out-of-Bounds Essays.” With their love of simplicity and the marginal in nature, their encouragement to pause and still the mind-chatter, and to recognize that nature is often a tough neighbourhood, Farrant’s Seventy-Two Seasons approaches that same territory with its call to practice mindful noticing. Progressing through nature’s seasonal cycles and harking to the observable reality of the here and now out there, her accounts resonate inwardly with common sense, discovery, moments of nostalgia, and a sense of hope that mythographers among us will surely recognize as “memories of the future.”

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Trevor Carolan has contributed for many years to prominent Buddhist journals in English, and is the author of Return To Stillness: Twenty Years With a Tai Chi Master. [Editor’s Note: Trevor Carolan has reviewed books by Yosef Wosk, Yosef Wosk, Richard Cannings, Tom Aversa, and Hal Opperman, Jonathan Manthorpe, Michael Schauch, and John Lent for The British Columbia Review. He reported direct from holiday about this winter’s concerning situation in Puerto Vallarta in Amid the insurrection, February 2026.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster