Following nature’s rhythms
Booker-prize winning Orbital, sunsets, seasons and tides
It’s December. Depending on where you are in the world, it’s probably cold outside, the nights drawing in. It’s a time that’s often filled with excitement – holidays on the horizon, shopping to do and cookies to bake. It can also be a pretty reflective period, as the year draws to a close and we get ready to welcome in the new.
Roz and I have been looking back on our first five months writing Curiosity Seeds, from our first ever newsletter on zooming out and the overview effect, to focusing on the local in Roz’s most recent post. So it felt like a full circle moment to me when Orbital by Samantha Harvey won this year’s Booker Prize just a few weeks ago. To me, it’s the quintessential zooming-out novel.
If you missed all the publicity about Orbital in the last few weeks, a quick recap: it’s a slim novel (only 135 pages) that follows six astronauts from different countries as they orbit the Earth in their spacecraft.
“It’s a day of five continents and of autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wilderness and warzones.” Orbital by Samantha Harvey
When I told Roz I wanted to write something about Orbital, she asked me what it was that I’d like so much about it. It had been a good ten months since I’d read it, but one feeling endured in my memory: calming.
Reading the novel, you feel as though you’re on the spacecraft too, observing the Earth as the astronauts do. They watch a typhoon building in the Pacific, the sun rise and set over the hemispheres, the northern lights electrify the North Pole. Sometimes it’s as though the astronauts are observing an uninhabited planet – all evidence of humankind invisible, except by night. By day, its nature that dominates. And there’s something both calming and humbling about watching these rhythms, in spite of the fact the astronauts are all too aware of the wars and destruction taking place on the Earth, and the personal human stories that connect them to this planet they call home. The astronauts may be very far from the Earth, but I found their experience and observations incredibly grounding (and had to remind myself that I was reading fiction). Observing the planet’s natural rhythms, there’s a profound sense of connection and longing for all that’s good and beautiful on the Earth.
“The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.” Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Re-reading Orbital got me thinking further about the rhythms of nature and how, in turbulent times, observing nature’s rhythms – from the pull of the tides, to daily sunrise and sunset – can be a source of calm, providing us with a greater sense of stability and hope. So however your 2024 was, whether it’s big global issues that are giving you anxiety right now, or you’re facing challenges closer to home, let this be a little pop of inspiration to help you find firm ground – wherever you are.
“Sunrise blasts open the dark and daytime floods in, the entire northern hemisphere once again luminous and humanless. Seas, lakes, plains, deserts, mountains, estuaries, deltas, forests and ice floes.” Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Sunrise/sunset
Sunrise
“Almost there,” someone shouted. We pressed on up the mountain, headlamps the only light to guide our way. As we took the final steps to the summit, the sun was just breaking past the mountains in the distance.
There is magic in the dawn. A whole day ahead, full of potential. As I live in the mountains, countless tours offer ‘sunrise hikes’. There’s definitely a smug feeling about having climbed a mountain before breakfast.
Admittedly, I’m not a great morning person, so I can’t claim to be running up mountains to catch the sunrise every weekend. But even sleepy morning people can manage a winter sunrise. There’s something special about being up in time to see light fill the world, a cup of tea or coffee in hand, blanket on.
Sunset
Some years ago, on a holiday in Costa Rica, my husband and I stayed in the surf town of Santa Teresa. Situated on the West Coast of Costa Rica, the village boasts spectacular sunsets, and every day tourists and locals alike would congregate on the beach at 6 pm to watch the sun go down. There was something very special about everyone in the town gathering at this time each day to watch the sunset together. It felt like taking a collective moment to breathe.
Several years later, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when I was cooped up in a studio flat for weeks on end, I found comfort in watching the sunset each day. It became a way to mark the end of home office hours, to feel assured that, no matter what was going on beyond the four walls of my flat, the world kept on turning and we would eventually get out of this.
Tides
“I am always wrapped up by the sea, walking past the tamarisk tree into Boat Bay (Onjohn Cove), the cold winds, the swell of the ocean breaking on the shore in heavy, rolling billows, heading towards the dark clouds and the stormy seas. Bright biting days.” Sea and Shore: Recipes and Stories from a Kitchen in Cornwall by Emily Scott.
When I was a student, I spent the summers working as a sailing instructor on the Isle of Wight. The sea between the Isle of Wight and mainland Britain is known as the Solent, and boasts some unusual tidal patterns. Our sailing centre was on an estuary and when it was spring tides (meaning there’s a very high high tide and a very low low tide) the water would all but disappear, revealing vast banks of mud. I used to imagine what would happen if the water never came back. Yet, of course it always did, drawn by the pull of the moon – a force it’s hard for us mere Earthlings to comprehend.
In February this year, we went on holiday to Cornwall. Our hotel room looked straight out onto the beach, and each day we’d rush back to watch the tide ebb and flow, entranced. It was honestly addictive. Each day it was different; sometimes the sea was rough, sometimes the waves would rush in, swallowing up all of the beach. I found myself waking in the night and pulling back the curtains to check how far the tide had come in – if it had reached the path below our window. There was an enormous TV hung on the wall in our bedroom, but we didn’t turn it on the whole stay. We didn’t need TV when there was so much going on outside our window.
Seasons
“There is change in the air. Early morning, when I open the back door, it billows into the kitchen, crisp, cold and fresh as mint. It makes white clouds of my breath. Winter has decorated ordinary life. Some days, everything sparkles, glamorising the lids of bins and the tarmac patchwork of the pavements. Frost etches mysterious patterns on the roof of our car, and the puddles that collect in the gutter are crisp with ice.” Wintering, Katherine May.
I’ve always liked the change each season welcomes – the shape it brings to the year. I love summer, but it’s made even better by the darkness and coldness of the winter leading to the anticipation of long summer days again in spring. Equally, now that summers in Europe are getting hotter, I find myself looking forward to the quieter, cooler days of late Autumn.
In her bestselling book Wintering, Katherine May explores ancient traditions around the colder months and darker periods of ‘winter’ in our lives. Drawing on nature’s natural seasonal rhythms and past traditions of embracing the winter as a time to slow down, she calls on us to consider how we might introduce the idea of ‘wintering’ into our modern lives.
Similarly, one of Cal Newport’s three principles of ‘slow productivity’ in his latest book by the same name is to “work at a natural pace”. A way to do this, Newport writes, is to embrace more seasonality in our work, i.e. consciously having periods of the year when we’re more productive, and other times for recuperation or refilling our creative well. Obviously, working seasonally is great if you’re a writer or in a job where you have a lot of autonomy over how you plan your time. For most of us though, true seasonality is challenging and at odds with the demands of modern work. Newport’s advice is to “implement small seasonality” by looking for opportunities to bring changes of pace into your work week or month, eg having no-meeting Mondays, or taking an afternoon off one day a month.
“In the sixteenth century, Galileo’s professional life was more leisurely and less intense than that of the average twenty-first century knowledge worker. Yet he still managed to change the course of human intellectual history.” Slow Productivity by Carl Newport
What inspiration do you draw from nature’s rhythms? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Have we sparked your curiosity? ✨ Read more:
Sea and Shore: Recipes and Stories from a Kitchen in Cornwall by Emily Scott. This book was sitting in our hotel room and I think it added to the whole mood of our time in Cornwall (we bought our own copy as soon as we spotted it in a local bookshop). Part cookbook, part a love letter to Cornwall, I find myself returning to it again and again not just for the great recipes, but for the taste of the sea on the Cornish wind.
Wintering by Katherine May. May’s book is back on the Sunday Times bestseller list as winter approaches. Reading it is like cuddling up in a warm blanket with a hot cup of tea on dark days.
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. Newport writes eloquently about how the concept of productivity in the 21st century workplace is flawed. Mostly written for knowledge workers, there’s plenty to agree with and draw inspiration from, even if many ideas may be difficult to put into practice.