…and in so doing, in this deep surrender to the rising dawn and climbing sun, we take the character of light as does our sister Moon. Rays of warmth. Creative energy. Giving of self that transforms the gift and the giver, feeds the soul of Earth and those who hunger on the shortest days of the year.

Learn to spin and ring with cosmic snails. Make simple works of ephemeral art to vanish with the making. Bind the days behind us to unravel those to come, one by one. Wear the winter sun with warblers who find it summer-enough here. 

Find a wild place in a deep ravine or a city thicket with nobody else around — only cheeps and flits, rustles and russets — away from traffic and your blankety-blank phone. A place where possums bask and the last of the smilax holds her green, where the blue sky slides on naked branches and noonday sticks to fungal jellies.

Open wide the thinning season, take the sun with wilder kin.

Right here.

— Jack Phillips

_{Credits and notes: golden crowned kinglet and witches’ butter fungus in late autumn by Troy Soderberg, young opossum by Neal Ratzlaff. Ephemeral art with flamed tigersnail disjecta membra by poet Angélica Perez. This Latin phrase refers to scattered fragments that are reassembled to make a whole as in the case, for example, of the reconstructed works of the ancient poet Sappho. This piece by Perez recreates the life of an individual snail with scattered shells from many snails, at least that’s how I saw it when I happened upon it in the woods. The poet Perez may have and most likely intended something else entirely, or nothing at all. (Making wild art simply makes us wilder.) Summer enough; a phrase borrowed from Henry David Thoreau, with which he described the northern songbirds that migrated south to New England, finding it more summer-like than their home breeding range.}