Monday, June 20, 2011 reinforces the reality that, in the end, really matters to me. The new morning, unlike Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, stamps itself indelibly as a supremely lovely breakfast. We stagger, shakily poised on top of the world — the Summer Solstice in Aroostook County! Hark, the air surges, full of memories and miraculous madness. The air just pours into our being — a refreshing force. There is a taste of magic in the air. A rushing wind reminds of the ugliness of old stale cigarette butts. The birds bound inexorably following the flow of the currents. Goshawks roll, pitch, and yaw contending with breezings over frightened fields. There’s an electrification of the elements. Deep greens and blues are the colors to choose.
Could some supra-reality exist, wired within, whereby the solstice holiday of such an Aroostook day permits us to tap and see the exceptional rarity and wonder of living. “Be, Here, Now.” This popular mantra compels and commands to immediately rearrange our wires. Taste the clouds, swim in the air, and dance on the grass. Fear not to conceive and receive your life. This still stands as the solstice message. But time is short. We must stand this day facing west on what must become once more the frontier of our lives.
The real show stopper on June 20-21, 2011 remains the Sun itself. I wander through the community with a piece of shade 14 welder’s glass just gazing at the Sun’s overpowering magnificence. And anyone sharing the same trail already knows they may gaze with me. When I began writing these sunny columns last December, the Sun’s aspect was much more muted, coasting along the southern edge of our visibility. No longer. Blasting through the highest windows of the Science Center, the Sun shines supremely and confidently. Hosted by the stars of Gemini the Twins, the Sun vaults to its highest altitude of the year, 66-67 degrees above the 1:17 p.m. EDT southern horizon.
There is an uncanny intensity to sunlight in June Solstice skies tickling our awareness of green life and gardenful colors. Suddenly, there appears an extra dimensionality to the leaves and landscape. It creates a yearning within us for more, sensing a breakthrough in our sensibilities. Usually, I am most aware of this personal phenomenon, on the road, at the hours of late evening twilight after 9 p.m. I accelerate westward near Skyway Plaza in Caribou, so near the realm of eternal light just over the next ridge … so close to freedom’s land.
How disappointing that all of us ignore and take for granted the Sun. With it, when the great billows of clouds rolled transformatively through the Maple Grove, and the soul reaches above the grim worm-filled ground and soars above, we see the blue planet, seamless and whole. Now, look! There suspended upon nothing, the waning gibbous moon regally reigns, adjusting to the flowing air, cottonized with clouds. Now, look! A jet contrail some 10 degrees in length, perpendicular to the horizon in the west plays with our perceptions. I muse. How can billions of human inhabitants of the Earth live so unawakened?
Who will awaken us? Seek the Sun this solstice season. Then your heart responds with love — the ultimate human expression of intimacy and holiness. At solstice time, we stand poised at the most energetic moments of County life. Spring growth remains still fresh and novel. Graduations and weddings abound. What other planets in this solar system respond so uniquely to space and sun. Ask the dragonflies whose wings over Aroostook explore for new freedoms over your favorite hillside.
As a boy I dreamt, as many boys dream, of the ultimate tree house. These June days, the clouds, so low and so swift, seem to invite the comparison to a community-wide tree house. Because our Western cultural system compartmentalizes life obsessively, we sadly cannot see our living spaces more cooperatively. And we remain in a diseased discontinuity between our best instincts and our obligations to our daily routine.
I stand facing west-northwest forcing the air supply into my damaged respiration. I demand the air to transform my mentality. And over my right shoulder I look up, with a dance-like thrust or the same blend of hip turn and shoulder sway that my best golf swing offers, to see a sky framed by white pine and flowing cloud — deep blue with some deep green. What cruel fate permits the world to awaken for a day and then fall back into an imposed slumber for the heart. When I was so young, there was no way to process the flow of life and nature. I just took it for what arrived — the novelty of it all. But today, in middle age, nature and sky and sun and star seemed among the ultimate expressions of my deepest love.
The best of nature on this solstice season compels a dance within us to find expression — a charismatic lift. How as nature’s lovers do we find the words, the music, the paint and clay to define our joy, our return to the motherland? What reservoir is large enough to contain our tears in the face of our success or failure? Can we overcome gravity’s perceptions briefly on such a day and create a heady and holy form of flight? Have we the will and the nerve to recreate our lives in the image of love?
“A Love compels me to seek upward to light the path of greatest need. To find the beauty in all space and time, I call Eternity. To find the face of truth within myself in the deep space high above — there is nothing in this world that can take away that Love.”
Larry Berz of Limestone is planetarium director and astronomy educator at the Francis Malcolm Science Center in Easton.
