Precious Connections
Jun 1, 2022
The sun slides toward the summer solstice, calling many of us to come together to celebrate. Or perhaps we will hold some special ritual at home. We will reach out remotely. There may be a special mead, a tea of fresh garden herbs, or a unique dish for this day!
The aging sun of this year will rise at 5:30 in the morning here in Colorado. Sunrise will be locked into its northmost rising at 58 degrees East-Northeast, for over two weeks during this bright month.
The evening solstice sun behaves like a child reluctant to go to bed in summer. The days around the solstice here are 15 hours long and, like an overtired toddler, the setting sun will seem to hover over the northern part of front range for much longer than we think is wise before suddenly, sharply, dropping below the horizon into its cool summer bed of night. This is all due to an optical illusion provided by our mountains and the curve of the earth, the precious lens of the atmosphere.
Some will gather in person. This year there can only be propane fires, but there can always be poetry and song. We find ways to make ritual either alone or together!
This is connection.
The human connection reminds us that we belong to people, and they to us. We form memories together that we review like photographs. We see ourselves in them, and our changes! Human relations are the oldest of mirrors.
The religious connection brings us back in touch with our values. The gestures of our hands match the bright stars in our hearts. This tea means the garden, these greens stand for the season. We speak the words that we choose to speak in the light of the sun, or a candle. We feel the presence in our lives of magic, or of our ancestors, Gods & Goddesses, or goodly inclined spirits. We have chosen this and we ourselves bring to mind the ethics and ideals we hold dear. We connect ourselves to our own sense of honor.
The day itself and our part in it connects us to the landscape, to the season, to the millions of generations before us all over the world and to everyone in this moment who is having a season. This is not an idea, a number on the page of a calendar. This is the tree in the yard of the house across the street where the sun always rises on the solstice. This is that one peak to the north where you know that orb of life will disappear. You witness this day, this earth, this sun, as so many others have before you. This is real and it pulls us out of our heads and into the spiral of living.
This is connection. More valuable than gold or land. More healing than statistics or ideas. Connection has a protective power like hydration for the soul.
And you can choose it.
I offer my gratitude to every member of our community who has creatively maintained connection during these last two-plus years of pandemic, to every person who ever reached out to someone else, and especially to those endowed with the ability to consistently reach out to others, to maintain human relations, to demonstrate the consistency of our well placed faith. I offer my gratitude to everyone who maintained their own rituals during this time, to those who had the wherewithal to remember to mark the holy days, to watch the moon rise, to witness the changing of the seasons in the plants, animals and birds.
We can choose it. We can maintain it. We can nurture it. We have connection.
Peace of the mountains to you,
Paulie Rainbow