一期一会
One Time, One Meeting
Ichi-go ichi-e. A Japanese phrase from the tea ceremony. The idea that this encounter — this exact moment — will never come again. Treat it accordingly.
Why a microseason calendar?
Each microseason is five days. It arrives. It passes. The eagles that line the cottonwoods above the Skagit in January will not line them in exactly that way again — not this year, not any year. The herring that coat the eelgrass in milky white one February morning will spawn and be gone before you think to look.
This calendar is not a reference tool. It is an invitation to be present for something that will not come back the same way. A reminder that the natural world runs on its own clock, and that clock is finer-grained than the four seasons most of us were given.
Ichi-go ichi-e as a way of meeting the land you live on.
About the designer
Mandy Sidana arrived in the Pacific Northwest as an adult and found himself undone by it. The scale of the trees. The silence under the canopy. A world that had apparently been here all along, waiting.
He was drawn in by someone whose knowledge of the indigenous plants and wildlife seemed almost like a second language — a fluency Mandy didn't have and didn't know how to acquire. Learning the names of keystone species felt vast and overwhelming, a field guide dropped into his hands in his late thirties with no map for where to start.
Then a close friend moved to Japan, and something clicked. The Japanese 72-microseason calendar — Shichijūni-kō — offered a different entry point: not taxonomy, but time. Not everything at once, but five days of one thing. The salmon are running. Pay attention now. They won't be here long.
This project is Mandy's attempt to build that calendar for the Pacific Northwest — a way of learning the land by learning to notice it, one microseason at a time.