Housatonic — Nigglers and scientists tell us when the Solstice occurs, on June 21, Sunday, the sun his reached its northernmost height in the sky. They’ll tell you, despite appearances, the sun is not really directly over our heads at all but has merely reached its northernmost height above the Tropic of Cancer just south of the tip of. Florida
But enough of that.
Solstice literally means “sun standing still” in the sky which it appears to do at its peak, hesitating for an instant before its leisurely trip back to the equator and the fall Equinox before diving into the growing dark.
In this beginning of summer, the western sky still glows but frays a little at the edge. The moon, big, benign, and summer orange, rises in the east. The darkness falls, a mere strip of indigo between the sun — and moon –- light, just open enough for the Big Dipper, now almost directly overhead, and a few the other stars to slip through.
Scarce starlight in the double glowing of the night sky remind us the Solstice is really about light, long days of summer so easy to live with, encouraging us to forget caution and prudence, and, like sky night, burn our candles at both ends.
Summer songs are of romance, of the fickle and inconstant moon. Perhaps that’s why summer, passing quickly, seems a missed journey to a distant or exotic place, a temporary respite from the reality where the senses flourish, where every small gesture of nature consummates in a sweet flower or a ripe fruit.
In this light, we wish the time might stand still, that the Solstice might last forever. But despite the light and the cloying beauty, we still mourn the too-swift loss of light even as it reaches its epitome. The progression of summer to fall engenders more melancholy than any lowering November day.
Writers with a tragic bent write about balance, point out the next Solstice occurs in deep December, that a person’s situation will rightly be much different then, his soul, frozen and quiet.
Adrienne Rich, in her summer poem Holiday, wrote, “…and then we kissed/ Tasting that sunlit juice, the landscape folded into our clasp, and not a breath recalled the long walk back to winter leagues away.”
Even old Hesiod cautioned, “It will not always be summer; build barns.”
Although we’ll lose only a few seconds of daylight for a week or two, the melancholy aspect of the Solstice means we’re beginning the long, slow, inevitable slide toward December and the shortest days of the year. By the end of July, the ultimate summer month, we’ll have lost forty-five minutes of light.
The solution then, is not to consider the Solstice as anything more than a notch time. Go out in these early mornings and know the clamor of birds among bejeweled leaves.
Breathe the perfume of the sweet clover in the bee balm. Realize that nothing will alter or halt the waning of the light. But don’t worry because nothing else will hasten it either.
