Poor Will's Almanack

This past spring, I walked, an ancient pilgrimage route in northern Spain. Many of the simple lessons I had learned prior to my trek resurfaced as I went along. For example, I relearned: Walking slowly matters. Anywhere is as good as somewhere. Home is where you choose it to be. Truth comes from the ground up. The horizon is the place to be. Distance is physiology. Nothing is ever the same. Motion is the great teacher. The path ahead is the great teacher. Now that I have returned home, I relearn

July 19, is the 200th day of the year, and now the tide of summer reaches as far north as it can go, and then starts to slip away back toward the Gulf of Mexico. The rate of the retreat varies with each year, but the balance always shifts during the seventh month. The day's length becomes one to two minutes shorter every twenty-four hours, and the countryside responds with changing color and sound. At the start of the year’s ebb tide, the land is in the middle of bee balm and coneflower bloom.

I have been making notes about the seasons in a daybook since 1978. Each day’s post contains observations of common events in nature in my neighborhood, village and nearby parks. I have learned that events in nature occur more or less at the same times each year. Sometimes I see trends, and I enjoy comparing the quality of seasons. I enjoy finding new things the more I look. What is most rewarding in all of this is discovering my life in the observations I make. The daybook has become an

Now in early middle summer, the days still seem to last forever, the Sweet Corn Moon is waxing, and cicadas soon fill the warm mornings and afternoons with their high buzzing whine. The number of flowers in bloom reaches its peak, and the world is full of color. Sirius, the Dog Star, the star of the Dog Days of July, moves to the center of the southern sky at noon, announcing the most intense heat of the year. Late at night, middle summer brings the stars of Hercules almost overhead, bearing the

I walked down toward the river in the morning: All around me, leaves were turning a deeper green from the advance of the season. Toward the water, white hobblebush hydrangeas in bloom brightened the undergrowth. Cobwebs of micrathena spiders lay across my way. I found a cluster of webworms on a buckeye tree.. Two luminescent tiger beetles raced in front of me. I saw that some honeysuckles had orange berries. Privets had green berries. Solomon’s plume had brown berries. Blackberries were green.

A season ago, I walked over a hundred miles at what I felt to be the same rate as the advance of spring. With a pack of about twenty pounds and a sore hip, I moved so slowly that the microclimates of farms and yards and roadsides and woods, closely observed, altered my previous sense of time and place, a sense that had been based on routine or schedule or obligation. In stead of that disconnection, in this pilgrimage, I sensed something like a congruence of movements – mine and the season’s - so

On a recent walk, I covered several miles a day over the course of a month. The longer I walked, the more I found it was harder to remember the day of the week or month. The time on my watch was no longer so important as the position of the sun or the temperature or the direction or strength of the wind. A taxi ride of twenty miles at the end of my hike revealed some of the other differences in my way of looking at what lay around me. As the car traveled quickly, covering ten to fifteen walking

When I walked the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain a few months ago, I relearned old lessons, lessons of motion and feeling. I hiked down country roads and byways, my face in the chilly wind, the weight of my pack on my shoulders and lower back, my legs pulling me along, the sky clearest blue – no clouds mile after mile, sun warming my neck. All the time I was heading west toward what is called “the End of the World” in Finisterre, the last outcropping of Europe. Along the dirt path were

Recently, I took a walk of almost two- hundred miles across the landscape of spring on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The vegetation and the emerging leaves on the canopy above me offered a dense background with many markers for the progress of the season as well as for my own progress along the path – on which I averaged about seven to nine miles in a day. My leisurely pace filled the time almost completely with floral events, with hills of bright wheat and woods of eucalyptus and pine,

When lilies and thistles bloom, mulberries and strawberries ripen, box turtles lay eggs, and winter wheat turns pale gold green, then it is the first week of early summer, and the whole season spreads into June. Catalpas and privets and pink spirea bloom as the first cutting of hay gets underway. Nodding thistles, Canadian thistles, the first great mullein, the first Asiatic lily and the first orange trumpet creepers open. In early summer’s second week, moth mullein, wild garlic and crown vetch