Prior to the Gregorian calendar, farmers in China and Japan broke each year down into 24 sekki or “small seasons.” These seasons didn't use dates to mark seasons, but instead, they divided up the year by natural phenomena:

In agricultural days, staying in-tune with the seasons was important. When should we plant seeds? When should we harvest? When will the rains come? Are they late this year? Knowing what was happening with nature was the difference between a plentiful harvest and a barren crop.

Clear and bright . Geese fly north, the first rainbows of the year appear.

Living in cities, most of us don’t need to know if the rains are late this year, or when the bushwarblers will start warbling.

But it's nice to have a more fine-grained way of thinking about the year; dividing such a big span of time into four big seasons feels really clumsy. Thinking in two week sekki seems to match how my life and environment changes a lot better.

Follow along with the changing of the seasons on this site, with the @smallseasonsbot twitterbot, or on your own calendar (Google, iCal). These are a few ways for me to enshrine this idea.

I'd love to push this idea further, make it more useful for people. If you have ideas of how you'd like to see this stuff, throw a note on this Github repo.