Poor Will's Almanack

This winter I have been reading poems attributed to the fourth-century writer, Ambrose of Milan. His verses, sometimes sung as hymns, combine traditional cosmology with petition. Amborse addresses the power that has created and orders the universe, the one who shapes the seasons of all things. He asks this giver of order to help us have the proper stability and natural balance in our spiritual life. He requests that the author of the days might also give meaning to our days, that our lives may

A recent visit to Serpent Mound in southern Ohio reminded me about the astronomical skills of ancient peoples. At intervals throughout the serpent-shaped structure, the mound builders had constructed sites from which they apparently observed the spring and autumn equinoxes, the winter and summer solstices, the farthest distance of sunrise and moonrise north in the summer, south in the winter.

In The Emerald Tablet, an ancient text by Hermes Trismegistus, the author attempts to explain the astrological mysteries of the cosmos. The work contains the phrase: “As above, so below.” Indeed the land does reflect the sky above it, and the Earth watcher can crete constellations and story no less than the astrologer. Both observers are “horoscopers,” or time trackers, who make shapes, signs and sense from scattered, arbitrary elements. The seasonal horoscope of the landscape around us is no

When winter approaches, I sometimes feel afraid. Often, the feeling is related to dreams I cannot remember, but it is also an old issue with me, something that often appears as a kind of autumnal uneasiness. The fears, like a kind of stomachache or cramp, dissolve the more awake I become. Exercise and coffee and list-making pretty much make them go away. Still, they lurk at the back of my mind like the effects an insidious seasonal neurotic disorder. When I ponder all of this, I tend to

As the last leaves of the year come down, seed catalogs start arriving in my mailbox, and I plan for spring under the Bedding Plant Seeding Moon. Usually, I order a few packages of geraniums, coleus and petunias, and I start them under grow lights close to the furnace, which happens to be in the attic. If I keep the soil warm, well watered and close to the fluorescent bulbs, the seeds germinate within a week or so and then develop steadily throughout the winter. Although I enjoy the flowers that

The foliage was still thick and lush when I entered the familiar woods one late September afternoon. I used to know those trails well, but now they had become overgrown, wilder than they were decades ago. The path was not marked, but I felt I knew where I was going. How could anyone get lost here? It never crossed my mind. I wandered and daydreamed, not paying attention to where I was going. And then, for a few minutes I was lost. My heart beat faster, and I picked up my pace. I knew where I was

A little rain then flurries about noon, then this afternoon, hazy sky, white sun low in the southwest, I walked along the brooks, water higher than it had been in weeks, and all around me the chickweed was rising through the mulch of the last honeysuckle leaves, through the crumbling strata of summer and fall, along the banks of the river, and up the wooded talus slopes, and there was garlic mustard, too, and sweet rockets and fresh wild onions and slippery ragwort leaves and floppy leafcup in

The first butterflies of the spring are easy to notice. They emerge out of April and May to seek the flowers of middle and late spring, and they are full of prophetic meaning. The disappearance of butterflies in the autumn is also prophetic, but it may seem less welcome. On the other hand, a horoscope – time watch – for the sun’s passage from middle autumn’s Libra into late autumn’s Scorpio, is able to provide some consolation. Informal records of seasonal zeitgebers, like butterflies,

With most of the leaves fallen, the countdown for spring is underway. And a person might count in all sorts of ways. One method is to keep track of the number of precipitation days: across the central portion of the United States about 50 days of rain or snow usually lie between now and April. Another gauge is the number cloudy days: in most of the country except along the west coast and the near the Great Lakes, there are almost never more than 75, rarely fewer than 60. Or one could monitor the

I went out into the woods and fields this morning: Small cups of gossamer were shining with dew, hanging to the tips of the dry wingstem. In the mist, the grass was yellowing, and the woods appeared like it does in April, bright leaves like new flowers. Seeds were sprouting in rotten tree stumps, the sweet smell of autumn ground all around me. The low sun rested in the treetops. The silver winding river, the fallen logs invisible in summer, lay below me. I saw a small flock of robins at the