Of course! The path to heaven
Doesn’t lie down in flat miles.
It’s in the imagination
With which you perceive the world,
And the gestures with which you honor it.

Mary Oliver

EPHEMERIS
FOR THE THIRD WEEK OF DEEP WINTER
The Bedding Plant Moon enters its last quarter at 9:46 p.m. on January 17. Rising after midnight and setting in the middle of the day, this waning moon moves overhead before dawn.
The sun reaches Aquarius on the 19th of the month, having shortened the Yellow Springs night by 26 minutes since winter solstice. When the sun enters Pisces on February 18, the day will 90 minutes longer than its shortest span. Then, the sun, which took two months to travel the first half of the way to equinox, will suddenly doubles its speed, completing the second half of the journey in only 32 days.

ANARCHIC COUNTING
The foliage of the oak-leaf hydrangea had fallen, its branches lined with new snow. The Osage fruits had turned deep red-brown, but now were capped in white. Berries of the euonymus were falling from their decaying, once protective sepals. Black walnut hulls were dark and collapsing, fell away at the touch of my heel. Only a few box elder seeds were hanging from their branches, thinning now like the honeysuckle berries. Cautious skunk cabbage spears were just barely visible, their north sides white from the night’s storm.

Notebook

Waiting for spring can be like trying to go to sleep when you have insomnia. Sometimes the best thing to do is to count. Counting is a simple measure of time, limits time to individual pieces, takes away its mystery and emptiness. Counting is an act of will, forces focus, works against discouragement, places the counter in opposition to the psychology and physiology of sleeplessness.
Numbers are infinite, and so are the pieces of winter. Counting in sequence creates apparent progress and finite limits. Even though awareness of winter’s events seems to produce few results, seems to have no sum or substance, observations can be like digits in a sprawling but promising nighttime equation, the fruit of persistence and dogged hope.
Like counting sheep or breaths or numerals, counting dimensions of the interval between autumn and April requires no rules or ethics, is not competitive, does not require special study or skill. Like counting sheep or breaths or numerals, the choice of things to be counted is arbitrary, has no necessary socially redeeming value, does not end poverty or bring peace, has no theology. This is the anarchy, the freedom of mindfulness that looses the mind’s eye to rhythm or accumulation or listing or repetition or the emptiness of any single object until something new suddenly occurs without our creating it, and we fall asleep and dream or discover spring.