Saturday, 1 March 2025
March
March bustles in on windy feet and sweeps my doorstep and my street
It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade
March, when days are getting long,
Let thy growing hours be strong to set right some wintry wrong
March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs,
bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling,
each followed by a frosty pink twilight
which gradually lost itself
in an elfland of moonshine
March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes, and a laugh in her voice
Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour
To welcome her the Spring breath’s forth Elysian sweets;
March strews the Earth With violets and posies
March brings breezes loud and shrill, stirs the dancing daffodil
In March winter is holding back and spring is pulling forward. Something holds and something pulls inside of us too
March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers
Springtime is the land awakening. The March winds are the morning yawn
March is the month of expectation, the things we do not know
In March the soft rains continued, and each storm waited courteously until its predecessor sunk beneath the ground
Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty
Despite March’s windy reputation, winter isn’t really blown away; it is washed away. It flows down all the hills, goes swirling down the valleys and spills out to sea. Like so many of this earth’s elements, winter itself is soluble in water…
March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again
By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again
The stormy March has come at last,
With winds and clouds and changing skies;
I hear the rushing of the blast
That through the snowy valley flies
This is the perfume of March: rain, loam, feathers, mint
March
Dear March, come in!
How glad I am!
I looked for you before.
Put down your hat —
You must have walked —
How out of breath you are!
Dear March, how are you?
And the rest?
Did you leave Nature well?
Oh, March, come right upstairs with me,
I have so much to tell!
We like March, his shoes are purple,
He is new and high;
Makes he mud for dog and peddler,
Makes he forest dry;
Knows the adder’s tongue his coming,
And begets her spot.
Stands the sun so close and mighty
That our minds are hot.
News is he of all the others;
Bold it were to die
With the blue-birds buccaneering
On his British sky.
The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter
The green field sleeps in the sun;
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest;
The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one!
Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated,
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill;
The plowboy is whooping- anon-anon:
There’s joy in the mountains;
There’s life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
Blue sky prevailing;
The rain is over and gone!
IT is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.
There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.
The stormy March is come at last,
With wind, and cloud, and changing skies,
I hear the rushing of the blast,
That through the snowy valley flies.
Ah, passing few are they who speak,
Wild stormy month! in praise of thee;
Yet, though thy winds are loud and bleak,
Thou art a welcome month to me.
For thou, to northern lands, again
The glad and glorious sun dost bring,
And thou hast joined the gentle train
And wear’st the gentle name of Spring.
Thou bring’st the hope of those calm skies,
And that soft time of sunny showers,
When the wide bloom, on earth that lies,
Seems of a brighter world than ours.
March
March
I Martius am! Once first, and now the third!
To lead the Year was my appointed place;
A mortal dispossessed me by a word,
And set there Janus with the double face.
Hence I make war on all the human race;
I shake the cities with my hurricanes;
I flood the rivers and their banks efface,
And drown the farms and hamlets with my rains.
If March comes in like a lion, it will go out like a lamb
If March comes in like a lion, it will go out like a lamb.
Weather folklore sayings are as colorful as our imagination.
While many sayings are based on careful observations and turn out to be accurate, others are merely rhymes or beliefs of the people who came before us.
Those people often believed that bad spirits could affect the weather adversely, so they were cautious as to what they did or did not do in certain situations.
Those beliefs often included ideas that there should be a balance in weather and life. So, if a month came in bad (roaring like a lion), it should go out good and calm (docile, like a lamb).
With March being such a changeable month, in which we can see warm spring-like temperatures or late-season snowstorms, you can understand how this saying might hold true in some instances.
We can only hope that if March starts off stormy it will end on a calm note, but the key word is hope. However, this saying seems to be simply a rhyme rather than a true weather predictor.
Thursday, 27 February 2025
When a patient receives a terminal diagnosis, a clock starts.
In an instant, the future becomes finite. Doctors do their best to predict life expectancy based on median survival, the period of time after diagnosis when half of patients with the disease are still alive.
But statistics can't tell you if you'll host Thanksgiving dinner...
..or attend your grandkids' recital.
Wednesday, 26 February 2025
It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one.
We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up.
And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know.
It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is.
Your foot falls down, through the air,
and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things
February is a suitable month for dying.
the winter hateful, hanging on too long
Even though February was the shortest month of the year,
sometimes it seemed like the longest
I used to try to decide which was the worst month of the year.
In the winter I would choose February
The reason that God
made February short a few days
was because he knew
that by the time people came to the end of it
they would die if they had to stand
one more blasted day
When we die,
as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt
— we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants.
Then we are ghosts, then we are myths.
But still we are together.
We are the past together, we are a distant past.
Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars,
I still hear your voice.
There's difference between being dead and dying.
We're all dying.
Some of us die for ninety years,
and some of us die for nineteen.
But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death.
Everyone.
So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing,
if you think about it
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.
Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.
We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people.
In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds,
how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
die with dignity.
There’s no such thing.
Our bodies break down, sometimes when we’re ninety, sometimes before we’re even born, but it always happens and there’s never any dignity in it.
I don’t care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass, its always ugly.
Always!
You can live with dignity, you can’t die with it.
Death is not about the disposal of the client.
What do the Dead care what happens to them? They're dead.
All the trappings of Death are for the living. It is the final reconciliation. The last farewell.
- the life force that all beings share and which animates them.
This enters the body at conception and returns to God, to the point of origin, at death.
Death is a stripping away of all that is not you.
The amazing miracle of death,
when one second you're walking and talking,
and the next second you're an object.
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