Totally. I think it's useful to have agriculturally based holidays for this purpose. Even if they're ultimately detached from their original purpose (i.e. I don't really need to know when the time to plant trees comes around), it's useful to have these celebrations with seasonally specific rituals to mark the passage of time.
Tu b shvat just passed. It's the Jewish holiday celebrating the birthday of trees. There's snow on the ground where I live, we still celebrate and plant seedlings in the spring to follow up. I just like trees and it means spring is around the corner which is nice too.
Last night I stuck all the major meteor showers into my calendar. I’d gone outside and seen stars and remembered how l much I love to see stars and I rarely stargaze nowadays. I’m going to make more of an effort, especially for the seasonal meteors.
You can add the NY Times astronomy calendar to your existing calendar if you don't want to manually enter in data:
subscribe to the interactive feed that adds the events to your personal digital calendar. Google users can click on this link to subscribe. Apple iCloud and Outlook users may need to copy this URL and paste it into your digital calendar’s “add calendar” field to subscribe.
For me, it begins in Spring with the song of the robins, and slowly transitions into red-winged blackbirds singing their song in the wetlands. That eventually dies out somewhere during early summer and I get really depressed. After that all I have to look forward to is the call of the flicker in the late evenings.
That sounds stressful to me. Like I don't have enough to worry about without wondering where the fuck the birds went, or remember to water the magnolias.
Today I heard bird noises when I woke up. I hate spring, and somehow we don't even get birds that actually sing instead of voicing a monotone "cheep cheep cheep".