Springly

Our two young Redbud trees have bloomed! It must be spring. Christmas, when we bound the wee trees with solar lighting, seems like a lifetime ago, considering all that has happened since.

At Christmas the trees looked like this:

Now they look like this:

“Spring drew on...and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre


“Spring is the best life coach: It gives you all the energy you want, all the positive thoughts you wish and all the boldness you need!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan


“Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

Vernal Equinox 2019

Arty Farty content comes early this week with a handful of paintings honouring the coming of spring..

"Spring"  (one of a 4-Seasons set ) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) 

 "Spring" by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1622-35.

 "Winter yet lingers on the footsteps of spring". By Stephen Reid (British, 1873 - 1948)

 "Vesna" (Artist unknown) Vesna,  the old Slavic goddess of spring.  Her name means messenger. She was a protector of Her people, especially the women. She returns from the Underworld at the Vernal Equinox

VERNAL EQUINOX

“Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.”
Archibald MacLeish

A few more thoughts, from far better writers than I will ever be, on the matter of springtime's hide and seek games:

In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.
Mark Twain

Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.
Charles Dickens

Winter lingered so long in the lap of Spring that it occasioned a great deal of talk.
Bill Nye

The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.
Henry Van Dyke

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.
William Carlos Williams

And...on Spring and the Vernal Equinox in general:

It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what.
John Galsworthy

Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!
D. H. Lawrence

Easter occurs on different dates each year because, like the Jewish Passover, it is based upon the vernal equinox, that dramatic moment when the hours of the day-light and the hours of darkness at last draw parallel and then the light finally and triumphantly wins out. Thus Easter is always fixed as the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. It's a cosmic, solar, and lunar event as deeply rooted in religious traditions originating from sun-god worship as one could conceivably imagine.
Tom Harpur

I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the 25th of December.
Tom Robbins


For Vernal Music Monday: George Harrison and "the other" Paul (Simon) with
Here Comes the Sun

What to do - nest ....

My spring-time wreath hangs on the outside wall of our chimney breast on the front porch. A couple of wee birds discovered this to be a warm place during cool nights. I'd noticed one or both birds flying off from the wreath of a morning when I popped out to collect the newspaper from the driveway - assumed they'd just been perching there. After mentioning this to husband he went to investigate, then ran in for his camera, and to call me to see what he'd found. A nest with four eggs! We are very careful, now, not to pry further, wouldn't want to annoy the parents!

So, the theme for this Music Monday has to be:

Or:





And, instrumentally, Stan Getz & Albert Dailey - Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most

Arty Farty Friday ~ Monet in Spring

For this Arty Farty springtime Friday, rather than featuring an artist born around this time of year, I've chosen a famous painter - one of the most famous in fact - whose work does real justice to the best aspects of springtime: Claude Monet.

Spring is all about light, both light the opposite of darkness, and light the opposite of heavy.
Spring has a light touch, colours are light, feelings and hearts after a long winter are light, the sky is lighter for longer. I think Monet, founder of Impressionism, caught all of this lightness better than any other painter.

"Claude Monet (1840-1926) exemplified Impressionism more completely and pushed it further than any other painter. The style’s radicalism lay in the determination to paint not just reality but the seeing of reality, the act of perception itself, by showing how light, especially bright light, tended to dissolve the colors and forms of the world. The key to this effect lay in spontaneous, broken, skipping brushwork — preferably registered in paint applied in front of the subject, en plein air.

The images produced are so familiar now that it’s possible to forget that Impressionism created a newly complex awareness for its original viewers. The experience of light was enhanced, but so was the physical assertiveness of the painted surface. Paint and reality co-existed in heightened tension.

In terms of sheer physical gifts Monet was superbly skilled at maintaining this tension. Cézanne’s famous summing up is still the best: Monet, he said, “is only an eye, but good God, what an eye.” — From "Monet Arrives and Ripens," by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, May 4, 2007 "

In his later years Monet developed cataracts.

"As his lenses degraded, they blocked parts of the visible spectrum, and the colors he perceived grew muddy. Monet's cataracts left him struggling to paint; he complained to friends that he felt as if he saw everything in a fog. After years of failed treatments, he agreed at age 82 to have the lens of his left eye completely removed. Light could now stream through the opening unimpeded. Monet could now see familiar colors again. And he could also see colors he had never seen before. Monet began to see--and to paint--in ultraviolet." (See HERE)

“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” ― Claude Monet

Rather than adding more dry facts this week (they can be read HERE; also at Wikipedia, and elsewhere, I'll post a handful of images of his springtime paintings, with a quick look at his natal chart. I shouldn't omit to mention, though, this artist's great love of gardens and gardening. Two good articles on this are at NPR, and at The Culture Concept Circle. His home and beautiful gardens in Giverny are open to visitors. It is said that these are absolutely breathtaking: "The moment you step into the garden you feel as though you have stepped into one of his paintings."

A few of his springtime impressions:

 Spring

 Springtime

In the painting above, Monet was less interested in capturing a likeness than in studying how unblended dabs of color could suggest the effect of brilliant sunlight filtered through leaves. (HERE)

 Spring at Giverny

 Spring

 An Orchard in Springtime

ASTROLOGY

Born on 14 November 1840, at 7:26 PM in Paris, France.
Natal chart has rectified time only...see astro.com

Monet has been described as strongly built, with handsome dark eyes, a fine voice, and a dominant personality, he stood about 5'5" according to Army records from his youth (cited by Charles F. Stuckey). It's said that he had had an "iron constitution", and that the calmness depicted in his paintings often belied the sort of chaos that Monet could stir up in his personal dealings. He married Camille in 1870, she died aged 32 in 1879; in 1892 he married long-time friend Alice Hoschedé, who had helped him raise his two children, along with her own.

If light was Monet's "driver" it'll show up in his natal chart. Light, surely, has to relate to the element of Fire. While Monet's Scorpio Sun was in Water sign Scorpio, there were three personal planets (Mercury/Venus/Saturn) forming a stellium in Fiery Sagittarius, next door. These linked by trine aspect to Pluto in Fiery Aries. If the rectified time of birth is near correct his natal Moon would have been in the other Fire sign, Leo.

A Yod links his Watery Sun and sextiled Earthy Mars to Pluto in Aries symbolically perhaps reconciling differences in sensitivities, and highlighting the difference mentioned in a quote earlier between the calm sweet depth of his paintings and his occasionally chaotic and dominant personality.

Easter's a Comin' In...

 Preparing bags of Maundy Money

Day before Good Friday in the Christian calendar is Maundy Thursday. This day in the UK is marked by a tradition of the Monarch distributing Maundy Money (see Wikipedia)

For us in government offices, Maundy Thursday meant the start of a lovely extra-long weekend off work. Most had a half day off on Thursday, then on Fri/Sat/Sun/Mon offices remained completely closed. In our legal-based office, even the following Tuesday was quiet, because in the city where I worked local lawyers, or some of them, following a peculiar local tradition, took Tuesday as holiday too. Easter was the longest and best best Bank Holiday of the year. Nowadays, in retirement, all days are much the same.

Easter. One doesn't have to be a devout Christian to appreciate the reality of resurrection and re-birth happening all around.

“In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It’s hard to walk briskly at this time of year; the accelerating pace of unfolding spring slows my own. I repeatedly stop- to watch what’s moving. Soon the torrent of migrants will completely overwhelm my ability to keep up with all the changes. But it’s easy to revel in the exuberance and the sense of rebirth, renewal.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World.

“There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale.

“If anyone or anything tries to curse or kill the Goodness at the Center of all things, it will just keep coming back to life. Forever Easter.”
― David Housholder, The Blackberry Bush.

Vernal Equinox ~ Japan. (& Music for a Monday Trip.)

Thoughts go to our sisters and brothers in Japan at Vernal Equinox, first day of Spring. Hoping fervently that this will mark a turning point and that the worst is over.

Shunbun no Hi, the Vernal Equinox Day, has been a National Holiday in Japan since 1948.

The week of the Vernal Equinox is known as Haru no Higan (Spring Higan). The word higan means “the other shore", and the festival comes from the Buddhist beliefs that there is a river full of illusions, passions, pain and sorrow, that divides the earthly world from Nirvana. In order to gain the enlightenment, the soul must fight with all these and cross the river. When the night and day are equally divided, at the equinox, Buddha appears on earth to save stray souls and leads them to Nirvana.

On the Shunbun no Hi, the family and friends visit the cemetery wash the tombstones…bring flowers, burn incense, pray for deceased and bring offerings: sake and ohagi (rice balls covered with azuki bean). Shunbun no Hi is also a nature festival and a day of prayers for future crops. (See here.)

Illustration:

The cherry blossom is the national flower of Japan. The Japanese celebrate its annual arrival -- friends will gather under the trees to enjoy sake, sing songs, and celebrate the coming of spring. Traditionally, Japan has offered cherry trees to foreign countries as symbols of peace. Designed by the Rabbit Air creative team, this simple silhouette of a tree was inspired by shadows cast by cherry blossom trees on white sandstone in early spring. (See here.)

Some journal entries of an American teacher, Anne Thomas, living in Sendai are online at Ode Magazine. The entries from 14 March are especially moving, and even uplifting, strange as that might seem. Do take a look.






Blog on hold for a few days. We are going to Austin, Texas, with a stop in Fredericksburg and nearby Luckenbach on the way there, or on the way back . We're going to see my husband's second great-grandchild, as well as his daughter and granddaughter. Husband has a birthday on Tuesday too.

It's Music Monday (almost forgot). Here's Waylon (still sadly missed) singing Luckenbach Texas.

Later!

Are we there yet?

There's still a week to go before the equinox when we get truly vernal, but the USA puts its clocks an hour forward today so....









Spring is like a perhaps hand
by e.e. cummings

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.



Born 14 October 1894 in Cambridge Massachusetts, at 7pm.

"Whimsical and experimental, E.E. Cummings was a popular American poet of the early 20th century. Cummings' first published work was his 1922 novel The Enormous Room, based on his time in a French prison camp during World War I. He became more widely known as an avant garde poet, thanks to his unconventional use of typography, syntax and sometimes scandalous (at the time) choices of words and topics. He had a fondness for scattering words unevenly across a page, and liked to spell his own name as e.e. cummings, leading generations of college students to remember him as the guy who didn't capitalize his own name. "
From Answers.com

There, in a very small nutshell, is the biography of e e cummings. It's a small nutshell, but it pinpoints salient parts of his personality to be seen in his natal chart (click on it to enlarge) :


Mercury conjunct Uranus in Scorpio - look at the adjectives in the bio above - avant garde, unconventional, uneven (Uranus), scandalous at the time (Scorpio) - in relation to his mode of writing (Mercury). It's classic. Love it!

There are a couple of oppositions - Sun and Moon, Mars and Saturn, close enough to blend into one big opposition Sun/Saturn in Libra opp. Moon/Mars in Aries. A broad interpretation of the complex aspect could be: a restless soul, charming but determined, not always at ease within himself. Venus, planet of the arts in its home sign of Libra trines creative Neptune and powerful Pluto in Gemini : an Airy boost to the imagination!