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

Shining Light on the Prairie - Springing into Summer

 

Meteorological summer, of course. That's science speak. It's due next Tuesday.

Pagans will just have to continue biding time. More ways than one, theirs returns soon.

'Round these parts, spring's been cool, not infrequently cold and mostly, dry. Lately the region's rated 'extreme drought.' Rain overnight and today will, perhaps, get us (however briefly) to 'moderate.'

Yee ha.

Today and the next couple, it's basically April. And not nice April at that.

Superior sends its frigid breath over the length of her long, lanky little sister Michigan. Cold spills from true north all the way to the greening prairie.

The lupine's happy, for sure. Were it not for the nasty wind, spitting grey skies and a serious case of preholiday indolence, I'd show you. Instead, for Memorial Day a great grandparent gets memorialized:

Lupine know winter's never over. Winter's always coming. Even despite hemispheric inclination and northern Pagans soon to celebrate Midsummer like that's a beginning, not an end.

In any event, big water giveth, big water taketh away. I'd rather live near it than not. So today, it's cold.

Even with the worrisome drought, freshwater still feeds and renews spring grass, wildflower and woods. Prairie wetlands with oak savanna islands are a repository of life like none other in the world.

A natural marvel that doesn't need us. Indeed, does better in our absence.

I miss Superior something fierce, but smell her on the wind. At least believe I do.

Soon enough, milkweed will blossom. Then Monarchs and great black wasps will appear as if by magic, except not that. Not that at all.

When the science is true, trust it. When the science is unproven but passes the eye/smell test especially year over year over year, incline toward the light.

By pretty much every reasonable estimation, this summer promises to be hot. Damned hot, depending. That's the definite trends.

Ecological, sociological, individually and collectively, it's only as good as we've earned.

Advocating now for anything not directly related to life on earth is past failure killing the future's best hope. The 20th Century's terminal.

Past time we got over it. All other liberties are secondary.

Considering the state of things this time last year and all that we've learned about ourselves in the interim, it's good to see the world turn once again. Even if on too hard terms.

There's life needs bringing. Time to bring it. Long, uncertain path ahead notwithstanding.

Different Places, Other Times - Part 2

Seasonal images captured on the fly using the Toy Canon during the original Odyssey. Not exactly high end files, but certainly serviceable during lean times.

2011-2013

May Day, Walpurgisnacht, et al.

May Day's a mixed salad of named holidays. Definitely pot luck.

To the Celts, May Day divided the year into dark and light halves. Doesn't get much simpler or more fundamental than that…

Get yours while the getting's good. Everybody make some babies.

Later, the Roman's brought with them their five day celebration of flowers and Floralia it became.

During the 6^th Century, Walpurga's feast got tacked on. Saint Walpurga was, among other things, anathema to witches.

Later still, Walpurgis Night became the one night of the year when witches held their annual earthly convention, with Satan the keynote speaker.

So on Saint Walpurga's special night, evil gets to walk the earth. Go figure.

During the 1880's, we dragged May Day into the Industrial Age.

May 3^rd 1886, Chicago Police opened fire on striking workers, killing at least two. Things went south from there.

May 4^th at Haymarket Square, a large crowd agitated for justice on behalf of the fallen, along with an eight hour work day. The gathering was peaceful. Chicago's mayor made an early appearance.

The evening wore on. Rhetoric grew hot. The police ordered the crowd to disperse. Someone threw a bomb.

More than 60 officers were wounded, eight died. No one then or now can say for sure how many protestors were killed or wounded.

Literally, working folk didn't count. Especially not socialists, the (then) new Satan.

Eight men were charged with the bombing. Pretty much everyone knew none of them threw the bomb. At least one had gone home by then. All save one were sentenced to hang. Four did. A fifth killed himself (or was murdered) before he could be hung.

By 1889, May Day was declared International Workers Day. The date was chosen by the American Federation of Labor to mark the strike leading to Haymarket that resulted in what some consider the most egregious miscarriage of justice in United States history.

In 1947 Congress declared May 1^st to be Loyalty Day, no lie. In '58 they changed that to Law Day.

Didn't help.

When I was a kid the godless Russkies owned May Day. Every year the mainstream media ladled Russian propaganda direct from Red Square straight onto American dinner tables.

Can't guess what May Day means in modern times. All things to all people, perhaps.

Dark into light sounds good to me.

Go pagans.

#mayday #walpurgisnight #haymarket

Earth Day - 2021

 

Tomorrow, National Poetry Month and #earthday pass like planets in conjunction.

I understand why poetry needs a month. All respect to my poet friends, it's a niche pursuit. If those who love poetry don't organize to remind most everyone else it's still here, maybe poetry as we've known it turns into something else.

Go, poets.

Earth Day, however… It just doesn't make any sense.

When I was a kid adults liked to tell this joke on children. Can't guess how often I heard it growing up, adults liked to rub it in.

A child asks, "We've got Mother's Day and Father's Day. How come there's no Kid's Day?"

"Because every day is children's day." Ka-boom. Welcome to life on the run, kid.

But Earth Day?

As if each and every day of earthly life on this dear blue world isn't that already?

Absolutely I honor those generations of activists that've carried us all thus far, as regards the tending of the world. Rachael Carson and others are giants astride earth's history.

And I get the necessity of using symbolism to grab some attention, too. It's what we do.

Then considering all the stupid stuff I once was taught as gospel truth, it's a long way we've come in a remarkably short time. People of good will must always remember that, while laboring at the rock of ignorance, greed and shortsighted human folly, so to someday rest upon a more sustainable landscape.

Except because we still rally around a symbolic day that exists to annually remind us without Earth as we know it there'd be no us at all, then the hard road already traveled by those who came before us isn't near enough.

Not fast enough. Not smart enough. Unsustainable.

Every day is Earth Day.

Take that, post industrial civilization. Time to grow up, kid.

Go life. With or without us.