Bøger af Bill Felker

This sixth volume of A DAYBOOK FOR THE YEAR IN YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, is memoir, extended meditation and guidebook to the month of May in southwestern Ohio - as well as in the Middle Atlantic region and much of the East and Southeast. The principal habitat described here is that of Glen Helen, a preserve of woods and glades that forms the eastern border of the village of Yellow Springs in southwestern Ohio. The passages from ancient and modern writers ( which accompany each day's notations are lessons from my readings, as well as from distant seminary and university training, here put to work in service of the reconstruction of my sense of time and space. They are a collection of reminders, hopes and promises for me that I find implicit in the seasons. They have also become a kind of a cosmological scrapbook for me, as well as the philosophical underpinning of this narrative. I have included the sunrise and sunset for Yellow Springs as a general guide to the progression of the year in this location, but those statistics also reflect trends that are world wide. Average temperatures in Yellow Springs are also part of each day's entry. Since the rise and fall of temperatures in other parts of the North America keep pace with the temperatures in Yellow Springs, the highs and lows, like solar statistics, are helpful indicators of the steady progress of the year everywhere. My daily, weekly and monthly weather summaries have been distilled from over thirty years of observations, and they offer a statistical description of each day. Although information about the Yellow Springs microclimate at first seemed too narrow to be of use to those who lived outside my area, I found that I could adjust my data to meet the needs of a number of regional and national farm publications for which I started writing in the mid 1980s. Soon I was finding that what had happened in Yellow Springs was applicable to many other parts of the country. The Natural Calendar sections of this DAYBOOK include approximate dates for astronomical events such as star movement, meteor showers, solstice, equinox, perihelion (the sun's position closest to earth) and aphelion (the sun's position farthest from earth). In this section also I note the progress of foliage and floral changes, farm and garden practices, migration times for common birds and peak periods of insect activity. At the beginning of this volume, I have included a floating calendar that lists average blooming dates for wildflowers that blossom between April and June in an average Yellow Springs season. Although the flora of the eastern and central United States is hardly limited to the species mentioned here, the flowers listed are common enough to provide easily recognized landmarks for gauging the advance of the year in most areas east of the Mississippi.The DAYBOOK journal itself consists of my notes on what I saw happening around me in Yellow Springs between 1979 and 2017. It is a collection of observations made in my yard, from the window of my car and from my walks in Glen Helen, in other parks and wildlife areas within a few miles of my home, and on occasional trips.The cumulative format of the DAYBOOK, which brings together all of the annual entries for the same day through the span of over thirty years, has shown me the regularity of the changes in the seasons, and it fleshes out a broad, multi-faceted picture of each segment of the year. This daily record and the natural calendar summaries, then, are records of moveable seasonal feasts that shift not only according to geographical regions but also according to the weather in any particular year. They are a phenological handbook and guidebook for the days. In addition, they can be used as an informal base line for monitoring future changes in local climate.

POOR WILL'S ALMANACK FOR 2017 offers a variety of ways with which the reader can follow the natural year: --A week-by-week description of significant events in nature throughout the twelve seasons --The Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) Index --Suggestions for gardening and farming by the moon --Predictions about the moon's effect on major cold fronts of the year --Information with which to follow the moon, the sun, stars and major planets --A "when-then" section that lists some of the endless connections between events in the natural world --Seasonal reflections by Bill Felker --A "floating"calendar that lists blooming dates for wildflowers, shrubs, trees and garden perennials --A calendar of feast days and holidays for farmers and homesteaders --Reader stories about living close to nature

This seventh volume of A DAYBOOK FOR THE YEAR IN YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, is a memoir, extended meditation and guidebook to the month of July in southwestern Ohio, as well as in the Middle Atlantic region and much of the East and Southeast. My daily, weekly and monthly weather summaries have been distilled from over thirty years of observations, and they offer a statistical description of each day. Although information about the Yellow Springs microclimate at first seemed too narrow to be of use to those who lived outside my area, I found that I could adjust my data to meet the needs of a number of regional and national farm publications for which I started writing in the mid 1980s. Soon I was finding that what had happened in Yellow Springs was applicable to many other parts of the country. In the Natural Calendar sections of this DAYBOOK I note the progress of foliage and floral changes, farm and garden practices, migration times for common birds and peak periods of insect activity. At the beginning of this volume, I have included a floating calendar that lists average blooming dates for wildflowers that blossom between April and June in an average Yellow Springs season. Although the flora of the eastern and central United States is hardly limited to the species mentioned here, the flowers listed are common enough to provide easily recognized landmarks for gauging the advance of the year in most areas east of the Mississippi.The DAYBOOK journal itself consists of my notes on what I saw happening around me in Yellow Springs between 1979 and 2017. It is a collection of observations made from the window of my car and from my walks in Glen Helen, in other parks and wildlife areas within a few miles of my home, and on occasional trips. The cumulative format of the DAYBOOK, which brings together all of the annual entries for the same day through the span of over thirty years, has shown me the regularity of the changes in the seasons, and it fleshes out a broad, multi-faceted picture of each segment of the year. This daily record and the natural calendar summaries, then, are records of moveable seasonal feasts that shift not only according to geographical regions but also according to the weather in any particular year. They are a phenological handbook for the days. In addition, they can be used as an informal base line for monitoring future changes in local climate.The passages from ancient and modern writers which accompany each day's notations are lessons from my readings, as well as from distant seminary and university training, here put to work in service of the reconstruction of my sense of time and space. They are a collection of reminders, hopes and promises for me that I find implicit in the seasons. They have also become a kind of a cosmological scrapbook for me, as well as the philosophical underpinning of this narrative.

Bill Felker's HOME IS THE PRIME MERIDIAN: ALMANAC ESSAYS ON TIME AND PLACE AND SPIRIT is a collection of forty-one brief essays taken from the nature column and almanac he has has written for several regional and national publications since 1984. The "time" selections are descriptions of and reflections on the seasons in his village of Yellow Springs, Ohio. The "place" essays focus on his relationship with the environment in which he has lived much of his life. The "spirit" essays connect Felker's observations of local events in nature with the awareness of his own fallibility and mortality. He shows how his encounter with the world around him (home) is the path on which he finds meaning in his life.

This memoir gathers together quotations about time and nature, meteorological commentary made up from my lengthy obsession with tracking the weather, extensive notes about common events in nature, syntheses of these events and astronomical information based on my years of writing almanacs. Although I have organized my writing on a scaffolding of backyard natural history and observation, I am not a naturalist and have had no training in the natural sciences. All of what is contained in the Daybook is the result of my search for myself and for meaning.This particular aspect of my search began in 1972 with the gift of a barometer. My wife, Jeanie, gave the instrument to me when I was succumbing to graduate school stress in Knoxville, Tennessee, and it became not only an escape from intense academic work, but the first step on the road to a different kind of awareness about the world. A short apprenticeship told me when important changes would occur and what kind of weather would take place on most any day. That information was expressed in the language of odds and percentages, and it was surprisingly accurate. Taking into consideration the consistency of certain patterns in the past, I could make fairly successful predictions about the likelihood of the repetition of such paradigms in the future. As Yeats says, the seasons "have their fixed returns," and I found points all along the course of the year which appeared to be fixed moments for change. The pulse of the world was steadier than I had ever imagined. From watching the weather, it was an easy step to watching wildflowers. Identifying plants, I saw that flowers were natural allies of my graphs, and that they were parallel measures of the seasons and the passage of time. I kept a list of when each wildflower blossomed and saw how each one consistently opened around a specific day, and that even though a cold year could set blooming back up to two weeks, and unusual warmth accelerate it, average dates were quite useful in establishing sequence of bloom which always showed me where I was in the progress of the year. In the summer of 1978, Jeanie and I took the family to Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small town just beyond the eastern edge of the Dayton suburbs. We bought a house and planned to stay. I began to write a nature almanac for the local newspaper. To my weather and wildflower notes I added daily sunrise and sunset times, moonrise and moonset, average and record temperatures, comments on foliage changes, bird migration dates, farm and gardening cycles and the rotation of the stars. The more I learned about Yellow Springs, the more I found applicable to the world beyond the village limits. The microclimate in which I immersed myself gradually became a key to the extended environment; the part unlocked the whole. My Yellow Springs gnomon that measured the movement of the Sun also measured my relationship to every other place on Earth. My occasional trips turned into exercises in the measurement of variations in the landscape. When I drove 500 miles northwest, I not only entered a different space, but often a separate season, and I could mark the differences in degrees of flowers, insects, trees and the development of the field crops. The most exciting trips were taken south in March. I could travel from Early Spring into Middle Spring and finally into Late Spring and Early Summer along the Gulf Coast. My engagement with the natural world, which began as an escape from academia, finally turned into a way of getting private bearings and of finding what I loved and believed. It was a process of spiritual as well as physical reorientation. In that way, all the historical statements in this collection of notes are the fruit of a strong desire to define where I am and what happens around me.

POOR WILL'S ALMANACK FOR 2019 is an almanack and horoscope-in-nature that readers can use to help them live in harmony with the sun, moon, stars, planets and the land around them. The ALMANACK uses a month-by-month overview of events in the sky and in the landscape, combined with a S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder ) Index, in order to help readers understand and respond to the influence of the seasons on their lives. The idea of an "Almanack Horoscope in Nature" may complement the principles and insights of traditional astrological calculations. However, the horoscope focus of POOR WILL'S ALMANACK FOR 2019 brings a very different perspective on "time watching." The word horoscope itself comes from the Greek words, hora, which means hour or time, and skopos, which means observer. Watching what happens in nature through the seasons, a time watcher becomes a "horoscoper." By focusing on events in nature - both on Earth and in the sky - the time watcher not only observes how the weather and the movement of the Sun, Moon, stars and planets are connected to the seasons but also how events on Earth reflect what happens in the sky - and how all of these events can be related to human emotions. No matter how much or how little the reader may consider the various ways in which to find his or her place on the planet, I hope that this edition of POOR WILL'S ALMANACK will, at the very least, increase awareness of the many forces at work in nature that create us and our habitat.

POOR WILL'S ALMANACK FOR 2018 offers a variety of ways with which the reader can approach the natural year: REFLECTIONS ON THE SEASONS BY BILL FELKER include humorous essays like "Buttercup the Weather Dog," more serious essays such as "Spring Journal on the Camino de Santiago" and phenological descriptions like "The Hinge of Early Summer" and "Inventory in Early Autumn." NEW NAMES FOR THE MOONS: This year's moons include the Frolicking Fox Moon, the Ducks-Scouting-for-Nests Moon, the Termite Swarming Moon and many more. Each annual version of POOR WILL contains different moon names that are based on an event that takes place in nature during that monthly period. ASTRONOMICAL INFORMATION in plain English gives monthly updates about the sun's position, the location of major planets, the stars and shooting stars THE S.A.D. STRESS INDEX measures the natural phenomena which are assumed to be related to Seasonal Affective Disorder: the day's length, the average percentage of sunlight, the weather and the phase of the moon. In order to create the Index, each of those factors was given a value from zero to 25, and then the four values were combined onto a scale of one to 100. The higher the number, the greater the stress. Lunar phase and the moon's proximity to Earth produce the most dramatic swings in the Index. Lunar ratings are based on tidal and sociological information that suggests the Moon is most influential when it is full, second-most influential when it is new and least influential at entry to its second and fourth phases. METEOROLOGICAL FORECASTS: The weather estimates in this Almanack are based on Bill Felker's charts of fractal weather patterns made between 1978 and 2017. Readers of his weekly and monthly columns throughout the United States have used these estimates successfully since 1984. Poor Will's Almanack for 2018 integrates lunar conditions with brief descriptions of expected weather systems in its "Almanack Daybook" section, suggesting how the moon's phase and proximity to Earth could influence the character of each major shift in barometric pressure. A CALENDAR OF FEAST DAYS for homesteaders, gardeners and farmers lists the days of the year one might expect the public to have increased interest in livestock or produce. This calendar is also useful when one is planning strategies for marketing to particular ethnic or religious groups. THE PEAK ACTIVITY TIME FOR CREATURES section is a monthly guide to lunar position and corresponding behavior. Many people find that livestock, children, fish and game are more active (and dieting is more difficult) when the moon is overhead: at midday when the moon is new, in the afternoon and evening when the moon is in its first quarter, at night when the moon is full and in its third quarter, in the morning when the moon is in its fourth quarter. Second-best lunar times occur when the moon is below your location, 12 hours before or after those times noted above. The approach of weather systems (high-pressure systems typically preceded by low-pressure systems) also influences fish and animal activity. THE ALMANACK DAYBOOK SECTION consists of daily gardening and farming notes, phenological information about changes in foliage, flowering and migratory activity throughout the year as well as commentary about lunar influence on predicted weather systems and seasonal stress. READER STORIES: Readers have been contributing to POOR WILL'S ALMANACK'S weekly and monthly columns since 1985. People have submitted memory stories, outhouse tales, narratives about unusual occurrences and special animals. Each annual version of the ALMANACK features the best submissions from recent years, and the 2018 edition includes several fine outhouse tales, such as "A Terrible Outhouse Afternoon" by Willy O'Halleran and "Surprise in the Outhouse" by Aldon Cisco.

This final volume of A DAYBOOK FOR THE YEAR IN YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, is a memoir, extended meditation and guidebook to the month of December in southwestern Ohio, as well as in the Middle Atlantic region and much of the East and Southeast. The DAYBOOK journal itself consists of my notes on what I saw happening around me in Yellow Springs between 1979 and 2017. It is a collection of observations made from the window of my car and from my walks in and around Yellow Springs, in parks and wildlife areas within a few miles of my home and on occasional trips throughout the United States and Europe.My daily, weekly and monthly weather summaries have been distilled from over thirty years of observations, and they offer a statistical description of each day. Although information about the Yellow Springs microclimate at first seemed too narrow to be of use to those who lived outside my area, I found that I could adjust my data to meet the needs of a number of regional and national farm publications for which I started writing in the mid 1980s. Soon I was finding that what had happened in Yellow Springs was applicable to many other parts of the country. In the Natural Calendar sections of the DAYBOOK I note the progress of foliage and floral changes, farm and garden practices, migration times for common birds and peak periods of insect activity. The cumulative format of the DAYBOOK, which brings together all of the annual entries for the same day through the span of over thirty years, has shown me the regularity of the changes in the seasons, and it fleshes out a broad, multi-faceted picture of each segment of the year. The daily record and the natural calendar summaries, then, are records of moveable seasonal feasts that shift not only according to geographical regions but also according to the weather in any particular year. They are a phenological handbook for the region and a time- exposure narrative of the month. In addition, they can be used as an informal base line for monitoring future changes in local climate.The passages from ancient and modern writers that accompany each day's notations are lessons from my readings, as well as from distant seminary and university training, here put to work in service of the reconstruction of my sense of time and space. They are a collection of reminders, hopes and promises for me that I find implicit in the seasons. They are a kind of a cosmological scrapbook for me and the philosophical underpinning of this narrative.