In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Interpretation
Embrace the natural world and the experience of hard work, particularly in nurturing growth.
Margaret Atwood's quote suggests that during the springtime, a season symbolizing renewal and growth, one should engage deeply with nature and the earth. The imagery of smelling like dirt at the end of the day indicates a sense of fulfillment that comes from working outdoors, planting, or tending to the environment, which symbolizes both the physical and emotional connection to the cycle of life and the importance of hands-on experiences.
In practice
This quote would be perfect as a mantra for a gardening workshop.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
The tree is stripped,_x000D_ _x000D_ All color, fragrance gone,_x000D_ _x000D_ Yet already on the bough,_x000D_ _x000D_ Uncaring spring!
The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Bring awareness to the many subtle sounds of nature - The rustling of leaves in the wind, Raindrops falling, The humming of an insect, The first birdsong at dawn.
...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.
What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet.
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