years – In the Woods

at the spring equinox

At the Spring Equinox, nature is stretching awake and we, too, surface from our winter stillness, driven on by the growing light and warmth of the sun. Alban Eilir is the dawn of the year. It brings with it a sense of hope and the fresh possibilities of a new day. We see everywhere the vibrant spirit of the Earth, whose irrepressible life bursts forth in the opening of buds, the surfacing of shoots, and the golden blossoming of primrose, daffodil, broom and forsythia. All life must rise up from the dark soil and break out of the safety of womb and egg.
~ Maria Ede-Weaving
(The Essential Book of Druidry: Connect with the Spirit of Nature)

the great ocean of sunshine

“The Farm at Trou d’Enfer, Autumn Morning” by Alfred Sisley

There is nothing that makes the seasons and the year so interesting as to watch and especially to keep record of the changes by which Nature marks the ebb and flow of the great ocean of sunshine which overspreads the earth.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
(The Seasons)

middle summer

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
~ Natalie Babbitt
(Tuck Everlasting)

laconic noons and sterner sundowns

10-30-16-1090 — 10.30.16 ~ Mystic, Connecticut

It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sundowns sterner, and Gibraltar lights make the village foreign. November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.
~ Emily Dickinson
(Letter to Elizabeth Chapin Holland, November 1865)

Autumn wins you best by this its mute
Appeal to sympathy for its decay!
~ Robert Browning
(Paracelsus)