The Summer Solstice
  by William Edelen

I love the days of summer. My thoughts today are on the wonder and miracle of the summer solstice, soon arriving. The dazzling, shimmering light of this solstice period balances the winter solstice. It is the Yin-Yang of the universe, the cosmic dance of complementary opposites. The heat waves radiate out from the mountain rocks that jealousy guard our home. The animals find shade from the noonday sun and the flowers wait patiently for their daily drink. I live surrounded by miracles and I realize that we humans are only a very small part, a unit of one, symbiotically related and dependent upon all of the other billions of protoplasmic relatives.

How is it that we are all connected in some marvelous and mysterious way to this cosmic dance of solstice and equinox? This something unknown doing we know not what?

I am in awe gazing at the flowers outside my study window. A long, long time ago there were no flowers. And then, just before the Age of Reptiles, there was a soundless explosion that lasted over a million years. It was the emergence of the angiosperms, the flowering plants. And from flowers came the mystifying emergence of man.

In these desert spaces of this summer solstice there grow thorny plants and spiny creatures. And within this same solstice are forests of giant trees, and great plains covered with grasses that weave a garment for the naked earth. And I think that the flowers of a rainy spring...and the grasses of a showery summer are good and beautiful and sufficient, even though they will shortly vanish.

The summer solstice reminds me that we live in the midst of and are supported by mysteries beyond our comprehension. "This Mystery that is the source of all true art and true science," wrote Albert Einstein.

Many want to differentiate between the supernatural and the natural, the sacred and the profane. But if the creation is the work of an omnipotent mystery, then the entire cosmos is its revelation, and everything sum total, is natural, sacred and spiritual and reflects the image of that same mystery. "How we delude ourselves," wrote Albert Schweitzer, "if we think otherwise. When we consider the immensity of the universe, we must confess that man is insignificant. Man's life can hardly be considered the goal of the universe, its margin of existence is always so precarious. A man is ethical only when he considers every living cell, whether plant or animal, sacred and divine."

Dr. Lewis Thomas, former Dean of the Yale University School of Medicine, used these words to describe it: "Every living thing is alive thanks to the living of everything else. Every form of life is connected. The planet Earth is like a single cell. Homo sapiens is really a very immature and ignorant species in the horrible way it has treated all other living organisms."

The summer solstice reminds me of the oneness of everything. "The universe is everything, both living and inanimate things, both atoms and galaxies. The spiritual and material are one, for the universe is the totality of all things," wrote Fred Hoyle in "Frontiers of Astronomy."

I adore the summer solstice. It is for me a reality check. It puts my life and existence in perspective.

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