night – Page 2 – In the Woods

any day now

4.26.23 ~ Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center
mama goose still sitting on her rock island nest

Many young leaves are dotting the trees now, spray and foliage both showing. The woods are quite green; the rapidity with which the leaves unfold between sunrise and sunset, or during the night, is truly wonderful!
~ Susan Fenimore Cooper
(Rural Hours)

it’s feeling much more like spring, even it it is still chilly

We got our second covid bivalent booster on the 25th, recommended to those of us over 65. This will make me feel a little safer traveling to North Carolina and being around more people in the coming months. We had our first bivalent booster back in September. I wonder if we’ll be getting one every six months from now on…

spring is surely coming

Oh, spring is surely coming,
Her couriers fill the air;
Each morn are new arrivals,
Each night her ways prepare;
I scent her fragrant garments,
Her foot is on the stair.
~ John Burroughs
(Bird & Bough)

~ spring equinox ~
(5:24 pm eastern time zone)

stargazing

My best Acquaintances are those
With Whom I spoke no Word —
The Stars that stated come to Town
Esteemed Me never rude
Although to their Celestial Call
I failed to make reply —
My constant — reverential Face
Sufficient Courtesy
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #1062)

summer lapsing away

“Flower Girls – A Summer’s Night”
by Augustus Edwin Mulready

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy —
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon —
The Dusk drew earlier in —
The Morning foreign shone —
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone —
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful —
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #935)

almond self-enclosed

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet —
all this universe, to the furthest stars
and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rose and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
(The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke)

middle summer

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.
~ Natalie Babbitt
(Tuck Everlasting)

white flowers of the night

mykolapymonenko-ukrainian-night-1905 — “Ukrainian Night” by Mykola Pymonenko

But here there was not a sound, and the air was scented with the white flowers of the night. It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
(The Moon & Sixpence)

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
(Flight to Arras)

a smile of light

edvardmunch-summer-night-inger-on-the-shore — “Summer Night (Inger on the Shore)” by Edvard Munch

Oh! the Summer Night
Has a smile of light,
And she sits on a sapphire throne.
~ Barry Cornwall
(The Nights)

~ summer solstice ~

a thousand unbreakable lines

munch-starry-night — “Starry Night” by Edvard Munch

I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable lines between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves — we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.
~ Mary Oliver
(Upstream: Selected Essays)