Everything is in motion
I’m longing to New York spring, and wondering when it will come. The spring is supposed to arrive on March 20th this year, everybody knows that, but I’m still wondering. But how comes people in my hometown has already been celebrating Spring for a week? February 16 this year was the first day of the year in our Lunar Calendar, which marked the first day of the agricultural calendar, where peasants stop working and celebrate a new Springtime with high hopes for a year of good harvest. But by celebrating New Year, people there are already more than 2 months late when comparing with the solar calendar. It is frustrated every year when I need to ask around for the day of the New Year, since according to the astronomical calendar, that day varies between January 29th to February 19th. Because of that uncertainty, there seems to always be that longing feeling for the new seasons. The beginning of Spring is the day of forgetting the troubles in the past and holding new hopes for the future.
The new, meteorological calendar is much more convenient by dictating the change of seasons exactly every 3 months. With that, every other aspect of the modern life also changes. Life gets more and more convenient. As the meteorologists are most concerned about the temperature, people in modern city has become thermally convenient as well. At work and at home, we can enjoy a moderate temperature regardless of seasons, and space is always filled with bright light regardless of the time of the day. But when stepping outside we can’t escape the motion of the universe. The earth is still on its way to the Spring equinox, which is still a month ahead. Now instead of longing for Spring, I am longing to get home to my heater everyday. But for some reasons my heater is very moody, and I need to hold my new hopes each day.
The moving of earth, or moon and everything else in the universe clearly had an important role in the “old” world, where people needs to be in harmony with nature. The day where there is full moon is the night people celebrate all kind of art forms. This cosmological motion, as a result, affects architecture and building practice as well. For example, the process of building with bamboo needs to consider the motion of the Moon. The bamboo must be cut when there is no moon, because in those nights there are no insects in the bamboo, thus makes it easier to be treated to become building material.
I’m longing to Hanoi autumn, which is always October. The temperature is around 25 degree celsius, the sunlight is warm and the air is relatively dried thanks to the right position of the earth in respect of the sun. The picturesque dim fogs in the late afternoon and the changing leaves in autumn has entered in countless of poems and songs. In one of those songs, the artist has added new property to the wind. For him the wind is tasty as a young lady’s hand, as it carries the scent of the “milk flower.” Autumn is romantic and nostalgic since we know that the leaves are changing toward decaying.
Maybe the artist’s nostalgia can be explained by science, if our universe is moving toward disorder and decay according the law of entropy.
– Tuan Manh Nguyen