Summer Solstice, 2021

In the Beginning, there was film.

And film was good.

Okay, you're right. In the real beginning there was red ochre and the like. Natural resources, put to specific purpose.

Then later instead of just marking the stone, we refashioned it in our own image.

After that came dyes, inks, pastels and paint. Even plastic paint, as this digital capture of acrylic on board from about the tail end of my misspent youth attests:

But alone among the myriad magic wands we have creatively at hand, film captured and held living light. Solstice is about nothing, if not light.

I remember this morning near the mouth of the fabled Tahquamenon River primarily because I pointed the old Nikon F at it and pulled the trigger:

Primitive technology aside, that conveys pretty much how it looked and more critically what it felt like, enveloped by all that transient glory.

I've not experienced a morning sky so visually overwhelmingly since. Thank goodness I've still got this one, eh?

In time, we took recorded light as true.

Or near true. Which over time became good enough for most of us, most times.

At the peak of high season, when in a more just and natural world everybody eats (lest you're the one being eaten), solstice sheds light on our inherited gifts and shortcomings alike.

I don't suppose the Pagans took that magic moment as either coming or going, exactly.

Instead I imagine aboriginal people grasped the opportunity to revel in whatever abundance they had. Some years, a bacchanal of sheer thanks. Others no doubt a desperate entreaty for a meager bit more.

Please, just a little bit more...

But alive on earth and together beneath the heavens, just the same.

So here's to film, when we first learned to capture the light.

First learned to shine life's light on everything, unique or ubiquitous, banal and momentous alike. All that we might better see ourselves, others and our collective place in the world reflected for us, in it.

It's said we feed 3.2 billion digital images and 720,000 hours of video to the ether every day. You know, give or take.

Today, truth is in all cardinal directions. It's where you find it.

Yet as ever, light shows the way.

In the northern hemisphere, we dance on solstice because the sun is high. Neighbors to the south, because the light climbs higher every day from there.

Either way, seeing it clearly was is and always will be the matter at hand.

#summer #solstice #summersolstice #pagans #midsummer #firstdayofsummer #photography