Lovely Seasonal Quotes From My Reading

“”And what does January hold? Clean account books. Bare diaries. Three hundred and sixty five new days, neatly parceled into weeks, months, seasons. A chunk of time, fo life . . . those first few notes like like an orchestra turning up before the play begins.” 

~ PHYLLIS NICHOLSON, Country Bouqet

 “January is the month for dreaming. Sitting by the fire while the wind howls down the chimney and the snow flies against the windowpanes, we read about far places and make lovely summer vacation plans, all kinds of other places, too, sometimes for years ahead. But when the garden catalogs begin tumbling out of the mails with their fabulous promises on every page, we desert all else. Invariably we decide we must have dozens of plants. More than there is room for. But with the garden frozen solid, it is a reasonably safe moment to be must having. By March, and time to order, we will have simmered down considerably.”

“I used to think that logically the New Year should begin in March when all nature comes to life. But no, before bursting forth in all its richness and glory, the growing year must have a quiet interlude of preparation. This, I’m sure, is one purpose of January. Biologists tell us that when all above the ground is dead from mid-December to the end of January, furious activity occurs underground. How comforting to look at the earth stark and frozen and know, despite appearances, something is happening somewhere down deep.”

“January is a rewarding interlude for human beings, a time for preparing not only for a new garden, but to take on new ideas and new thoughts. Some months are action months, some are thoughtful months. January, to me, is a thoughtful month, a ruminating time, an interlude for evaluating the year just past. Here we stand with twelve beautiful months before us to do with as we will. What will they bring, what challenges, what riches? Each month is a part of the whole, and it itself a new beginning, as is each hour. Each moment, even is new and untried. What will the pattern and shape of this year be? What in it do we

want more of and what less of? We will probably carry out certain plans, each week will have its special rhythm.”

“I fine the most rewarding times are those in which events don’t crowd too close. but where there are intervals between, intervals of freedom. I make a resolution to let there be, during the year coming, more hours and occasionally whole days quite devoid of previous plans. I resolve to leave time to follow inner promptings, to investigate further whatever pricks my attention inwardly and outwardly, and to do more things on the spur of the moment.”

“Winter is the season when we see the earth in large, broad sweeps, in forms, masses. It is too cold to stop and examine details. Everything is simplified. We see the bones of the land. We see what was here before and will remain after us. What is older than time, what is forever enduring. In contrast to summer’s growth and tropical tangle, there is a cleanness and simplification everywhere visible. Through bare trees we observe the shape of curving hills beyond the brook - the basic plan and structural beauty of the valley.”

“In their opposites, perhaps, city and country are the two sides of man - the active and the doing side and the quiet and meditative. A city is straight lines, horizontal and upright. Lines that lead man far out and away from himself into action and doing, while the curving country landscape brings him back to his own center. I know I am most content when my days are filled with constant awareness of the sun rising and setting, of leaves unfolding in spring, flourishing in summer and dropping in the fall. I find my spirit thrives when close to the ebb and flow of nature’s tides.

- Jean Hersey from A Sense of Seasons