Solstice

Today was all smells of hot grass and asphalt, summer smells.  It is just beginning.

Here we are on the cusp of the season of cotton candy and carousels and ripe tomatoes. Crickets will soon be making a racket out there, and cadydids, there will be the smell of fresh cut hay and cows will cluster in the shade at the edge of the pasture, and then… cicadas will come in August with the sound that sends me reeling with school panic, no matter how old I am it simply does not matter.

But solstice always makes me feel a litte sad, since tomorrow we lose something, a tiny moment of light, and we move just a little bit toward the dark of winter– and yet, here we are!

I wonder what it is in me that panics so in moments of change– as if I need to hold on to what is.

I sit and breathe, in and out, the necessary beautiful simplicity of taking in and letting go. But it is so hard to just let things be–my inclination is so much more of holding rather than letting go.

But in this moment I am lying still, comfortable, breaths of cooling night air coming in through open windows…. in the worry of fearing or mourning what gets lost, it is so easy to miss the beauty of what is happening in this moment.

10 pm and the sky has just turned the dark blue of india ink directly overhead. The trees make night seem close, but I know if I could peek above the treetops, that even this far north, the western sky would still hold enough light to silhouette.

Beautiful image used with gratitude,  by permission of the photographer who captured this magic, Emily Chastain.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/emster214/2956861530/