June 21, 2012
I want a way to note each of the year’s four seasonal watersheds, the two equinoxes that usher in Spring and Fall and mark the halfway point to extreme light or darkness, and the solstices, cosmic exclamation points that mark a solar yet very earthly beginning and end, Summer and Winter. I want this not only for me but for all the members of the human family, we consumers of light and dark and the fruits of the earth. I’m shooting for a celebration both raw and real, earthy and honest, cosmic and human.
I’m not sure anybody gets time right. I’m pretty sure I get it especially wrong. For example, today, the first day of summer and the longest day of the year, I am thinking: “This begins the headlong rush to the garden’s end, days inexorably shortening, shortening, until the frozen ground yields no fruit under winters hand, resting till spring. (Am I odd to be thinking this on this day of record-setting heat?) In my own mind I just planted this garden even though we’ve been eating lettuce for over three months now, plus chard, turnips, peas, onions and more. And now I am starting to pick okra, and see baby beans, peppers, and many small green tomatoes swelling with the promise of sweet ripeness. I reflect and realize that frost (three months off) will not end my garden tomorrow, and a flood of fresh vegetables is still headed my way. My poor sense of time and my tendency to focus on a moment in the future is part of why I want to mark the day the season changes. Here are some thoughts I wrote down three months ago:
March 21, 2012 – The vernal equinox is today. Once again the sun and the earth align in a particular way, handing people a sign post, a mile marker for the next stretch of living. Today is the end of one season and the beginning of the next. But on we rush, busy, anxious, heedless, lost in our own thoughts or submerged in a little screen that connects to who knows what and blinds us to today’s milestone. Sometimes, people really put the us in oblivious.
I see most people, certainly myself, so busy, so submerged, our little screens and big works sucking us away from a thing, a moment that could root, or at least orient. This year it’s even worse with a too-early spring arrival rushing past, the parade half over before the grand marshal’s driver has even turned the key or set his foot to the accelerator. We need a holiday this first day of spring even more than usual.
The sun’s movement and the earth’s tilt with the resulting light, dark, or balance of the two, give us a space, if we’d only realize it, to take stock, to mark a moment, to remind us of the big world we’ve been given to tend, to use, to share. I’m looking for a way to celebrate this day consonant with my Judeo-Christian faith yet that celebrates and cherishes the earth and living things and time’s movement the way ancient, pre-monotheisitc people might have. I feel a distant kinship to, or maybe a little jealousy of, people whose attention was focused on the rhythms of life and living things, on the earth that sustains them, the sky that brings rain to nourish and the sun that warms and is the source of energy and growth.
I don’t want to wake up one morning many years from now and wonder how I got to be seventy or eighty all of a sudden, realizing I had rushed through it all so fast I hardly took the time to soak up the moments, the passages, the points in time that mark a movement from one minute or day to the next. From now until then and beyond that to that last morning I wake up on this earth, I will note the progression of days and weeks and months and my growth within that movement. One opportunity I will take to do that are the four yearly passages from one season to the next.
Many holy days and holidays (not all) celebrate a past event and its ongoing relevance now. That’s o.k. and important, but I want this day to celebrate a current event, life and living and our place in time and in the universe at this moment.
What would this festival, this celebration of the movement of these four elemental, temporal events look like? For sure it would include food and drink, appropriate for the season (naturally) and currently ripe and available. Music would be a part of it, singing, playing instruments, listening to quality performances. I think decorating a room, a house, or a yard with seasonal images and colors and objects would be another way to focus ourselves and each other on the moment. Prayer and corporate worship, acknowledging the creator of all this, jumping on his train that’s already in motion, would be a part of the day. I would like to see some sort of service to people or the earth such as volunteering a few hours for a good cause, picking up trash along a beach or road, visiting someone in a nursing home. Maybe celebrators could declare a television-free hour to step out to the front porch or yard and watch the sun sink over the horizon at this latest time of the year. Maybe then, at dark, we could sit around fires and tell stories and look up at the vast universe around us.
I suppose we won’t be able to convince Congress to declare these four days national holidays, so probably we will have to find ways to celebrate that fit in with our usual responsibilities. I’d be satisfied to know that me and my neighbors and all the other friends and relatives of the human family were pausing for a bit to acknowledge these four unique moments and reflecting on our place in it.
