Early spring means sugaring time in New England and the north country. The success of this long-held ritual of tapping sugar lies in the timing of essentials including long, cold, dark, winter nights. The other essential is emerging light of the day.   

I have always wondered about driving a hole in a tree bark of the naked trees, sans their iconic leaves. But I learned that while tapping a tree creates a wound, it quickly heals, ready to sprout new energy. Each year, the life force flows, tapping into life's sweetness. 
       -----G. Hill

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up on the source.  You tap into it.

           — Anne Lamott

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.

       ------Sophia Loren

We must keep waters for wild rice, trees for maple syrup, lakes for fish, land and aquifers for all of our relatives - whether they have fins, roots, wings, or paws.

             -----Winona LaDuke

 Though our feelings come and go, God's love runs deep in us forever.
      ------C.S. Lewis

And it shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the Lord
        -------Joel 3:18

Hope as a Feather