Category: Time of the Season

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

“Spring: a lovely reminder of how beautiful change can truly be.”-Anonymous

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”

 Pablo Nerudo

See stars in the changing season and dance among them, shining.

Mary Anne Radmacher

The brown buds thicken on the trees,
Unbound, the free streams sing,
As March leads forth across the leas
The wild and windy spring.
–Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832–1911)

I feel lucky to be a Marylander. We’re fortunate to see the seasons bleed into one another while our landscape gradually shifts around us. As swift and grand an entrance Autumn makes, coaxing annual crowds of “leaf peepers”, we can’t help but to rubber neck as she coyly dissipates after a mere few weeks. As if she stole the stars above, she marks our rural roads with glints of crystalized treks, exposing an invisible map only managed by the richness of the moon. Pockmarked ancient roads are temporality replenished with brown snow and black ice, but as the days grow longer, the fissures of ice have no choice but to surrender into puddles of mud. Spring saunters in, teasing us with bouts of warmth scattered among the loitering winter days. A familiar seasonal tale, that we all know too well. Our eyes flutter open to a sight for sore eyes. Trees grow obese with succulent emerald leaves that burst from countless buds. Tasseled sleeves fashion the arms of elder pines, bowing down as they touch the earth. Families of serpentine ivy crash and collide, choking neighboring geriatric trunks, suffocating any traces of dun and scorched flora; their chaotic embrace leave only the sweetest viridescent shades of summer behind.

The tonic twilight yawns, casting droplets of dew that radiate like a myriad of heliotrope, speckled in spots mimicking flecks of blood. Breaches in the clouds spill an invincible iridescence that clarifies and nurses the sear-spotted grounds, healing wounds from the dry afternoons of Autumn and the gelidity mornings of Winter. She eventually succumbs, melting into the invincible glow of a horizon renewed. As nature things, we inherently form cocoons around these algid days, wrapping the season around us like a childhood blanket. Triggered, we lounge and mask in the familiar warmth of nostalgia, soaking up the season’s diffusing aura like a trite kitchen sponge. Like clockwork, time dove forward; we wake in the dark, but come home in the light. Like spirits haunting ancient houses, we roam from dim room to room, anticipating for spring to drench through our windows and seep into our homes. Some are fortunate enough to taste that sweet sense of rumination with a ride down our rural roads, allowing the quiet and quaint saturate us, deafening the constant shrill and incessant echoes of society. And if we dare stand still long enough, she will unearth her secrets; respite for the beauty that surrounds us and the realization that there is still good in this world and it will continue to be good if only we respect her foundation that nurtures us, we care for the things that we love. Roused with change, we wake to the irenic songs and heavyhearted hymns that drown out the infinite thwarted apologies: whispers of seasonal remorse, the unquenchable thirst for the familiarity and the pining for the forgotten senses. She stretches and spreads her tepid rays that zigzag and seep into the cracks of black-out curtains.  She casts warm, threadbare-like shapes that creep up bedroom walls, beckoning us to rise and shine.

Canopies of archaic trees oscillate and kiss the ancient sky. Below, cliques of bare naked limbs gyrate to the requiem of nature. The sincerity of light stalks the woods edge, precipitating a reflection of the spirit and soul that evokes the deep, cool colors of the ocean. With arms wide open, we welcome the season change as the zephyr’s notes embrace us like an old friend. The migrating winds shift and collide, electrifying the mellisonant air, stimulating the deep, weary cells that lie dormant within us. The atmosphere’s modifying presence summons an abstruse awakening that cloaks the seawater stained sky which cradles the full Worm Moon. It’s always the time of the season.🎴

the many faces of the worm moon☾

However, more research revealed another explanation. In the 1760s, Captain Jonathan Carver visited the Naudowessie (Dakota) and other Native American tribes and wrote that the name Worm Moon refers to a different sort of “worm”—beetle larvae—which begin to emerge from the thawing bark of trees and other winter hideouts at this time.

There are quite a few names for the March Moon that speak to the transition from winter to spring. Some refer to the appearance (or reappearance) of certain animals, such as the Eagle Moon, Goose Moon (Algonquin, Cree), or Crow Comes Back Moon (Northern Ojibwe), while others refer to signs of the season:

The Sugar Moon (Ojibwe) marks the time of year when the sap of sugar maples starts to flow.

The Wind Strong Moon (Pueblo) refers to the strong, windy days that come at this time of year.

The Sore Eyes Moon (Dakota, Lakota, Assiniboine) highlights the blinding rays of sunlight that reflect off the melting snow of late winter.

the next full moon