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Poor Will's Almanack: May 10 - 16, 2016

Holly Sparkman
/
Flickr Creative Commons

I have been thinking that if every aspect of the landscape is predetermined by the spin of the Earth and biological clocks, how similar my own changes and progressions must be, all attached to the sun and the moon, to heat and cold, prearranged as if there were a cosmic map organic to my brain, as though, like some migrating species, I simply did what I needed to do in order to discover and fulfill my purpose.

Such a scenario seems less a deterministic trap or cage than it is a self-guiding pathway: perhaps I do not choose this or that action so much as I evolve to see the sweetest way. Like a hiker in the woods, I follow the terrain most in tune with my energy, my sense of adventure, my physical capabilities, my constraints of time. Or, like apple blossoms cede to dogwood and azalea blossoms, so I cede to what comes next in this place. My logic belongs to habitat.

And so spring here (or in my body) could not, barring some catastrophe, be other than an anteroom to summer. In spite of circumstantial ambivalence, the land and I do what lies within our sequence, not because we are constrained to do it so much as because it is the only sequence into which we fit.

This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the final week of late spring. In the meantime, let the season have its way: just fit in.

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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.