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Poor Will's Almanack: August 11 – 17, 2020

Green and red tomatoes ripening on the vine.
Andy Rogers / Flickr Creative Commons

I let myself go into the benign warmth of the day, and I allow myself to see the unfolding of August revealing the truth of matter and time in the buds that form beneath exhausted flowers and the buds in all the foliage of trees so soon to lose their leaves.

Here in the buds that will unfold in March and April lies a simultaneous movement away and toward, a potent kernel of tidal rhythm and rotation, a perfect loop that denies cosmology of everlasting expansion, affirming instead a circle which keeps everything from traveling away from us, keeps our acts and our lives from expanding forever outward like the universe.

Watching these buds and bearing witness to their closed cycle, I ground myself in just what lies around me, learning to understand home, finding enough in the most simple observations and events, embracing the ordinary and expecting nothing more, accepting this particular passage of time and location in time, seeing infinity in the commonplace, asking nothing more than these plain events and objects, allowing, opening, watching visions that contain their own transcendence and compensation, holding close the lazy August precision of each fragment that names the exact place of Earth’s orbit and my exact place within it now.

I’ll be back again next week with notes for the second week of Late Summer In the meantime, don’t hurry. Lie back and let the day come full circle, telling you where you are.

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Bill Felker has been writing nature columns and almanacs for regional and national publications since 1984. His Poor Will’s Almanack has appeared as an annual publication since 2003. His organization of weather patterns and phenology (what happens when in nature) offers a unique structure for understanding the repeating rhythms of the year.