Time: Shifting Seasons

In Prose and Verse:

"The cycle of nature—the progress from seed to fruition to dying-off and then renewal in the spring—was mirrored in the wild fields and the cultivated garden alike, while the fragility of harvest—the possible interruption of the cycle by drought, wind, or other natural calamities— established the pattern of how humans understood the workings of the cosmos.  The oldest of surviving sacred stories have their roots in the garden and reflect how humanity sought to understand the changeable patterns of their world and, at the same time, to imagine a world no longer subject to change.

Peg Streep  

"It is better to have lived one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep."
Tibetan saying

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
Emily Dickinson 

"There is an appointed time for everything. 
And there is a time for every event under heaven -
A time to give birth, and a time to die;
A time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted."

Ecclesiastes, 3:1-2 

"Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky,
How beautiful it is? 
All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness
There is a poem, there is a song. 
Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring. 
When the spring comes, it again fills the tree with
The music of many leaves,
Which in due season fall and are blown away. 
And this is the way of life."

Krishnamurti

 "Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly--and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing."

Omar Khayyám   



"For eternally and always there is only one now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."

Erwin Schrodinger

"Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all." 

 Stanley Horowitz

This grand show is eternal.  It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.  Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and glowing, on sea and continues and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."

John Muir

"The day is of infinite length for him who knows how to appreciate and use it."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Four seasons fill the measure of the year; there are four seasons in the minds of men."

John Keats

"Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new... but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design?" 

Paracelsus

 "Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,
And stars to set; but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!"

John Milton 

"The whole life of man is but a point of time; let us enjoy it."

 Plutarch    

 "Time discovers truth.
Time heals what reason cannot."

Seneca 

Original and beautiful artworks are copyright and courtesy of Victoria MacLeod at http://www.victoriamacleod.co.uk/