The longest day. Perhaps a signal that from here on out that it’s declining light until the winter solstice. The summer solstice comes as a delight and a trick that the days are getting longer. But the solstice was it. We yearn and ache for the warmth, the light that we went so very long without. So we ride along happily in our illusion, stretching out and into the long luxury of illumination.
Nearly a half-century of summers.
Those new fresh early ones were filled with the timeless carefree play of dirt pies, and swing sets. The sharp discovery of a feather on the ground, or a seed, berry, leaf or twig. Each found object was an opportunity for reverie, for make-believe, for adornment, or dissection.
Later the self-conscious summers arrived; bikinis and tans and makeup were the cover-ups for a still-innocence that turned inward to self-scrutiny. Somehow the direct link to the natural world got muted and subsumed in the need to fit in, to be of a tribe, to be called in affection a member of the human group.
But thankfully, those days persisted through only a smattering of seasons, until this one: long, ambling midlife—stretching several decades and finding rootedness more and more and more in the rewards that come with showing up to life, as it is, in the fullness of who we are. Achingly long hikes in the wilderness, even fasting alone in deserts, but especially the dream that realizes itself in waking day by day to this land as it is too. The more we see the land as it is —scarred or scared or seemingly unaware of the way it shines and gleams in the waving heat of summertime—the more we see ourselves, and all beings, as we all are. No need for facades, but an abiding and overpowering need to be whole.
The middle-aged cannot fathom with any real honesty the final phase, the last season of life in the summer season. So we must open up our ears and hearts to really listen to the elders. I met such a one yesterday—wise in intellect, wise in creative pursuit—a man so perfectly balanced in head and heart, he glistened like a fleck of gold, those pearly blue eyes ones in which I swam as he twirled out his stories spanning just a mite under a century. The Centenarian!
And there it is, the season of a life recalled in a single day of a season of the year.
Summer, a time for presence.
The summer solstice is nearly upon us, a day to celebrate the longest daylight of the year. A day to relish the growing things, the fecundity of Earth that brings forth golden rays, little mirrors of the sun on the ground.
These stretched out days are ones to cherish.
Although isn’t every day a treasure if we but embrace it?
(Excerpts from blogs orig. posted in 2012 and 2013.)
June Solstice Greetings!
