"A new year begins, as we say.
And the latent bud on the branch doesn't stir one whit, the blossom in the bulb
sleeps undisturbed in the frozen ground. The woodchuck's hibernating pulse
doesn't quicken one beat, and the deer in the thicket is just as hungry as he
was yesterday. Man is the only animal to whom this new year is important. All
the others live by day and the season.
The old year dies and we face
the new year as though it were an entity, new as a newborn babe. A new calendar
with twelve leaves, one for each month. Something in us, some need for the
specific, the orderly, the mathematical exactitude, calls for such demarcation.
Yet any year, regardless of arbitrary time, is like a circle; you can start at
any point upon it and, following the circle, you come back to that point. Our
year, our circle, happens to be a cycle of the seasons, planting, growing,
reaping, resting; and thus it is a part of the earth, the soil and the flowing
waters as well as of the stars by which it is gauged.... And year's end is
neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that
experience can instill in us."
(Hal Borland)
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