And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home. It is a journey we can make only by the acceptance of mystery and of mystification – by yielding to the condition that what we have expected is not there.

Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness

EPHEMERIS FOR THE SECOND WEEK OF DEEP WINTER
    The Bedding Plant Moon is full on January 10 at 10:27 p.m. Rising in the evening and setting in the morning, the full moon lies overhead in the middle of the night. On January 11th, Yellow Springs sunrise time – which remains at 7:57, its latest time of the year, between December 31st and January 10th – finally starts to slide back toward summer – a two hour and 51 minute journey that will take it to its earliest rising in Yellow Springs, 5:06 a.m. (without Daylight Savings Time), on June 9th.
    And by this date, sunset has already moved from its earliest time (5:10 p.m.) to 5:30. It will continue to occur later in the evening until, on June 24th, it reaches its latest setting time of 8:08 p.m. (almost three hours later – without Daylight Savings Time – than on December 14).
    A few hours before sunrise, the sky appears the way it will be on the warm evenings of middle May. Arcturus is the brightest star overhead, followed by the Corona Borealis. To the east are August’s Vega and Cygnus the swan. The only remnants of winter  are Castor and Pollux setting in the northwest.
    In milder winters, fresh poppy leaves, new pyrethrums, and wrinkled lemon verbena can appear in the garden. Pine trees pollinate, and purple deadnettle can bloom any time an afternoon gets into the 50s.
    Venus continues to be the evening star in Aquarius this month, low in the southwest after sundown. Mars in Sagittarius is barely visible along the horizon in the southeast at sunrise. Jupiter follows Mars in Capricorn, setting in the far west at dusk. Saturn in Leo comes up at evening twilight; it follows Orion and Cancer across the sky throughout the night, disappearing after dawn.

THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
In The Unforeseen Wilderness, a call for the preservation of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, Wendell Berry describes what happens when a person steps away from familiar ground, enters a wilderness or ventures “alone into a new place.” Negative emotions like “the ancient fear of the unknown” that come from a lack of familiarity are, he says, not the experience of the new place itself, “but of yourself in that place.”
Berry suggests that the discomfort which arises because of being out of place is not overcome by learning the place so much as by learning yourself. The experience of physical disorientation is one of “essential loneliness, for nobody can discover the world for anybody else.” What might appear to be a human-versus-nature encounter is actually a psychological or spiritual challenge in which the outside world is a testing ground. And once a person rediscovers balance, “learns to be at home,” then nature offers “the possibility of sudden accesses of delight, vision, beauty, joy that entice us to keep alive and reward us for living.”
Wendell Berry does not say exactly how a person is to find self in nature; he promises, however, that the forests and rivers and mountains and prairies are key to the journey of discovery and that “they can serve as spiritual landmarks in the pilgrimage to the earth that each one of us must undertake alone.”