Down the Rabbit Hole

February Musings & Nature's Perserverance

"Blogging Circle of Friends "
Day 4027: February 28, 2024
Prompt: “Even though February was the shortest month of the year, sometimes it seemed like the longest.”
JD Robb
What do you think? Does February seem like the longest month of the year?

Where I live in coastal New England, January and February are sometimes lovingly referred to as the two "months of suck". This year those months have definitely lived up to that moniker. January has a minor redemption built in because it kicks off with the New Year's day holiday, but by mid-month, the joyful holiday euphoria is a distant memory and Spring is a promise too far off. February, though shorter, seems to be an entire Winter long with its endless weeks of cold snaps and daylight that vanishes before 5pm. This year we have had milder weather which has made it slightly easier to bear but it is still easily everyone's least favorite page on the calendar. March looms large with the promise of brighter mornings, a harbinger to the Spring waiting just around the corner.



"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 3022 February 28, 2024
Prompt: What are 3 things you appreciate about nature?


Nature awakens each morning in degrees. I love that time just before sunrise when the world wakes up in the dim light. Mornings are peace for me, whether I wake to find the ground covered in bright new snow, or find my feeders full of early activity, colorful yellow finches and the occasional buzz of the visiting hummingbirds. There are some rare mornings when that first light has a certain quality in the way it coats the branches and stretches across the across the fields, an almost unearthly brilliance that makes you stop and hold your breathe and take stock of the world and your place it in.

Nature is fierce. There is a power in the surf during a storm, or in the wind that rocks the tops of the tallest trees. If Natures is the warrior, then weather is her weapon. There is a terrible vulnerability exposed when its nature verses man. With all our science and technology, we are still completely at the mercy of where a tornado touches down, or where a storm's destructive reach can take out causeways and erode entire beaches in a single afternoon. Who isn't even a little fascinated by the thunderstorms with the booms and crashes you can feel in your chest and the lightening that splits the night skies in silver arcs?

Nature persists. I think that is perhaps my most favorite thing about it. It perseveres. I have always found something beautiful in the way a forest will reclaim an abandoned amusement park or collapsing barn. Or the way a coral reef absorbs a sunken ship, laying claim to it with new growth. Barnacles and sea fans can camouflage an old cannon so that it you have to look past new beauty to see the traces of the old lines and shapes. Nature comes back from ravaging wild fires, new green shoots rising from ashen soil. There is a comfort for me in knowing nature cannot be triumphed over. It is a powerful reminder that our time here is temporary and the old world under our feet is taking daily measure of how we spend it.