“The air of October is sweet and cold as the wine of apples,”

Edgar Lee Masters, from Songs & Satires (1916); “Johnny Appleseed”

“If we look to myth, the bee is the ritual creature of a host of lordly ones. To anyone capable of suspending for a moment the cavortings of the rational mind, of accepting myth for what it is — not a story or a lie or a corruption of the facts, but the very essence of truth — it should need no great inward effort to access their significance.” His eyes bore into me, testing to see if I had yet understood. Then he spoke again, very slowly: “It is a matter, merely, of listening.”

The Shamanic Way of the Bee, Simon Buxton

Let the winds of autumn rise and come in storms over the black moors! Let the torrent roar through the forest and the tempest howl in the crowns of the oaks and the moon show her changing face in pallor through the breaking cloud -

Ossian, quoted in ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, tr. David Constantine