Category Archives: Seasons

Birds, In the neighborhood, Seasons, Snapshots

My spring

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Did you ever chance to hear the midnight flight of birds passing through the air and darkness overhead, in countless armies, changing their early or late summer habitat? It is something not to be forgotten… You could hear “the rush of mighty wings,” but oftener a velvety rustle, long drawn out… occasionally from high in the air came the notes of the plover.
–Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

The warming March sun and a faintly whistled “peep lo” lured me to Sandy Hook this weekend to greet the newly arrived Piping Plovers. Courting Woodcock the evening before, an Osprey making a bee-line up the coast and the season’s first Phoebe completed the day.

Happy Spring!

Seasons, Whatever

Balancing the year

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“The short days are past us now… thus the year balances its accounts. In our latitude we know that each year brings the time when not only the candle but the hearth fire must burn at both ends of the day, symbol not of waste but of warmth and comfort. The sun cuts a small arc far off to the south and shadows and cold lie deep. It is for this time that we, if we live close to the land, lay up the firewood and the fodder. Now we pay for the long days of Summer, pay in the simple currency of daylight. Hour for hour, the accounts are balanced.

And yet, the short days provide their own bonus. The snows come, and dusk and dawn are like no other time of the year. We come to a long Winter night when the moon rides full over a white world and the darkness thins away. For the full-moon night is as long as the longest day of Summer, and the snowy world gleams and glows with an incandescent shimmer.

Year to year, we remember the short days, but we tend to forget the long nights when the moon rides high over a cold and brittle-white world. Not only the moon nights, but the star nights, when it seems one can stand still on a hilltop and touch the Dipper. Who would not cut wood and burn a candle for a few such nights a year?”

-Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons

OK astronomy geeks… with tonight’s solstice and lunar eclipse… is tonight the longest and the darkest night ever?

How many of you mean to stay up to see it?

(shivering at the thought!)

Image from here.

Seasons, Snapshots, Wanderings

Daybreak

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There is truth in a tree, yet it’s of a different kind, now. It’s not the verity born of strength and affirmation, but the peaceful quiet of fulfillment and endings.

The passing of summer is the passing of beauty; first the chicory is gone and now the goldenrod has faded. I feel winter rushing towards me in the painful blue of sky. The maples are busy making their own light; the long deep breath of Autumn has begun. 
Seasons

Autumn on the doorstep

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Some Borland tonight…

“Another week and Summer will be officially at an end, since we demarcate our seasons by the solstices and the equinoxes. We who live in a land of seasonal change will have Autumn on our doorstep. Even now the sun rises east and sets west, so far as the eye can see; and one hears regret that another Summer is gone.

In a sense, this is so; and yet no season, nor even any year, either stands alone or vanishes completely. Summer is rooted in Spring, and Autumn is essentially Summer’s maturity. The apple now reddened on the tree was a fragile blossom, a delight to the eye and a host to the bee, only a few months ago. The honey in the comb was pollen when June was at its height, and rains of April and hot July nights now come to ripeness in the cornfields. Even before the leaves come swirling down, buds are on the bough for another Summer’s shade.

Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night; and thus he would never know the rhythms that are at the heart of life. There is a time of sprouting, a time of growth, and a time of harvest, and all are a part of the greater whole. There comes the time now to savor the harvest, to pause and know another year not yet brought to full finality.

The rhythm of life and thought and change will be close around us now, and the restless energy of Summer will be distilled into the stout brandy of another season. Change is ours to know and accept and build upon, even as the skies of Autumn clear and the leaves begin to fall. Fallen leaves open wider horizons to the seeing eye.”