Once again we are halfway through the year. I was up at dawn as the last Spring thunderstorms passed through, I watched as the sky lightened through thick clouds to bid good bye. After making some coffee, I went into the yard to check the gardens for damage from the torrential rains that fell through the night. I wiped off the table and dried a chair. I watched the sky as the clouds thinned could already feel the air getting warmer. Summer is here.
Summer officially arrived at 12:38 PM as the Earth tilted towards the sun at its Northern maximum, the Tropic of Cancer then quickly began its journey back to the south.
It is a but a moment in time significant for so many cultures, religions and countries. Here in the US there are many cities that will light huge fires in public places to celebrate the longest day of the year, Midsummer. The fires will be lit in the fire pit in my yard. I’ll fix a dinner tonight with some of the newly harvested vegetable that are available at the local markets and seasoned with the herbs from my garden.
ONCE, HUMANS were intimate with the cycles of nature, and never more than on the summer solstice. Vestiges of such awareness survive in White Nights and Midnight Sun festivals in far northern climes, and in neo-pagan adaptations of Midsummer celebrations, but contemporary people take little notice of the sun reaching its far point on the horizon. Tomorrow is the longest day of the year, the official start of the summer season, the fullest of light – yet we are apt to miss this phenomenon of Earth’s axial tilt, as we miss so much of what the natural world does in our surrounds.
In recent months, catastrophic weather events have dominated headlines as rarely before – earthquakes and tsunami in Asia; volcanic cloud in Europe; massive ice melts at the poles; tornadoes, floods, and fires in America. “Records are not just broken,” an atmospheric scientist said last week, “they are smashed.” Without getting into questions of causality, and without anthropomorphizing nature, we can still take these events as nature’s cri de coeur – as the degraded environment’s grabbing of human lapels to say, “Pay attention!”
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