What a beautiful day for a bike ride. 50ish temperature, sunny and calm. I rode up Elston Avenue to the Caldwell Woods .
Then, further north, past the Miami Woods prairie restoration project..
Along the north branch of the Chicago River past Golf Road, then back south. Not much fauna other than robins and squirrels until I encountered these young deer in a clearing about two miles north of the entrance to the woods.

The Magi were Persian Zoroastrian astrologer-priests;
Marco Polo claimed to have seen their graves in what is now Tehran.
My father made these in the early ‘fifties, modeled on a Christmas card. I put them out on my porch in winter and remember him.

As a young child, this cartoon gave me the oddest sort of happy-sad feeling. A magical ceremony of birth, death and the promise of rebirth.

“… we noted various recent orientations that tend to reconfer value upon the myth of cyclical periodicity, even the myth of eternal return. These orientations disregard not only historicism but even history as such. We believe we are justified in seeing in them, rather than a resistance to history, a revolt against historical time, an attempt to restore this historical time, freighted as it is with human experience, to a place in the time that is cosmic, cyclical, and infinite. In any case it is worth noting that the work of two of the most significant writers of our day - T.S. Eliot and James Joyce – is saturated with nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition and in the last analysis, for the abolition of time.”
– Mircea Eliade The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, 1954