I now suspect that if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures, the world will appear to us as a living creature. Wendell Berry, Renewing Husbandry   LUNAR PHASE AND LORE

Opening a barn door for the sheep standing out in a cold rain, or throwing a few grains of corn to the chickens are small things, but these little things begin to add up in you, and you begin to understand that you're important. You may not be important like people who do great things that you read about in the newspaper, but you begin to feel that you're important to the life around you.

The sun and the stars are pieces of our inner habitat as well as segments of the greater landscape. They are part of the concentric circles of our awareness, and of the contours of our brain. They bend and soften linear time. They connect us with the round, rotating years, with the rest of our lives, as well as with others. LUNAR PHASE AND LORE

The cold is our ancient companion; prehistoric people developed their art and technology on the edge of ice-age glaciers. To return back indoors after exposure to the bitter, inimical, implacable cold is to experience gratitude for the shelters of civilization, the the islands of warmth that life creates. John Updike LUNAR PHASE AND LORE

January 8 - 14, 2012 Then blow, Winds, blow! And rave and shriek, And snarl and snow Till your breath grows weak -- While here in my room I'm as snugly shut As a glad little worm In the heart of a nut! James Whitcomb Riley, "Winter Fancies" LUNAR PHASE AND LORE

I sing the cycle of my country’s year, I sing the tillage, and the reaping sing Vita Sackville-West. LUNAR PHASE AND LORE

If we didn't remember winter in spring, it wouldn't be as lovely; if we didn't think of spring in winter, or search winter to find some new emotion of its own to make up for the absent ones, half the keyboard of life would be missing.

So snowflakes actually start off all alike; it is experience that makes each one just different enough to be noticed... The final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever stranger and more complex patterns, until at last they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.

When woods are bare and birds are flown, And frosts and shortening days portend The aged year is near his end….   William Cullen Bryant   LUNAR PHASE AND LORE

There is a seasonal exhaustion in the air. The ground is cool and subdued as the hills turn dusky and purple by late afternoon. I pass cleared fields full of stubble, the lank, dark stalks of corn.