Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Twelve Moons of the Year. December 03.

Significant sentences from The Twelve Moons of the Year by Hal Borland, a chronology of the New England seasons.

"We know again the long winter nights when the moon rides over a white world and the darkness thins away." p. 348.

"Year to year we remember the short days and we tend to forget the long nights of moonlight and starlight, when it seems one might stand on a high hill and touch the Big Dipper." p. 348.

"Ice and stormy wind are inevitabilities, but they pass even as the leaf and the blossom, equally inevitable in their own season, ripen and are gone." p. 349.

"The cold verity of winter completes the cycle of the seasons." p. 349.

"Even such a simple thing as a snow flake or an ice crystal is, in a way, a fragment of universal truth. The infinite variety within a six-fold pattern is beyond human achievement. The power in an ice crystal manifested in winter dwarfs the energy in a man-fractured atom." p. 350.

"Even so rudimentary a thing as a root, a seed or an insect egg is an expression of insistent vitality, of life itself...life, which will persist whether man is here to see it or not...and occasionally, we catch a glimpse of its elemental meaning." p. 350.

"...Christmas, not a mass or a sermon, but a secular festival to the innocence of children and the goodness of mankind." p. 351.

"Christmas: What we celebrate is the birth of a child into a time of dissension and oppression and a world of cruelty and suspicion, one who grew up to teach peace and justice and love of fellow man...as simple as that." p. 351.

"Christmas: But what we are really celebrating is the obscure birth of one who lived, and died, for a simple creed--peace, justice, and love of fellow man--so simple that we still find it difficult to accept complete; we celebrate the hope, the dream." p. 352.

"On a cold day, a chickadee needs its own weight in food to keep the inner fires burning." p. 352.

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