“They go publishing the ‘chronological cycles’ and ‘movable festivals of the Church’ and the like, but how insignificant are these compared with the annual phenomena of your life, which fall within your experience! The signs of the zodiac are not nearly of that significance to me that the sight of a dead sucker in the spring is. That is the occasion for an immovable festival in my church. Another kind of lent.”

– Henry David Thoreau, Journal, October 16, 1859