Poor Will’s Almanack for the third week of Late Spring.
In his journal, the poet Thomas Merton refers to the virgin point of the morning, a time just before dawn, when all beauty of the day is still waiting to become.
By this time in May it seems that the virgin point of the year is long past. It seems that point must have occurred in earliest spring, just before aconite and snow crocus bloomed, in the days before the cardinals and the doves and the robins sang before sunrise, the days before the trillium, the days before the first butterfly.
Of course, in our circular universe where beginnings and endings so often spiral together, virgin days are actually everywhere, even in the middle of May:
the days before the fledglings appear
the days before the fireflies flicker the days before the swallowtails arrive under next week's black swallowtail moon
the days before the first strawberry ripens
the days before the first garden peas come in the days before the mulberries darken
the days before roses bloom the days before turtles lay their eggs in the warm river banks
the days before the wheat turns to gold the days before the longest days of the year
Virgin time is not only an outrider of the future but sweetens the events to come. Virgin time compounds the seasons, prolongs them, heightens them, nurtures dreaming and fantasy.
And that continual space of anticipation links together all of the consummations, so that emptiness is always process towards and from, a perpetual tidal virginity of motion to and away, a virginity in which the constantly evolving present never loses its delight but continually reaches and holds and loosens and tightens, gives up and subsides, joining all the points, making them - not alike - but one together.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the fourth week of Late Spring. In the meantime, look for all the infinite virgin days.
