strike that

solace

Tomorrow is the longest day of the year. There’s something so marvelous about that, particularly up here in Oregon. My friend from southern California came north a few weeks ago and had trouble adjusting to all the daylight. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, not even if you came to me mid January offering a year of uniform days, each with at least a little sun at the end.

I like to remember that I’m spinning through space. I like a reminder of the forces and movements too big for me to understand or register directly. Some days – some months, it turns out – I feel so totally at the mercy of the invisible that there is nothing to do but watch it in awe and keep lookout for the familiar.

I miss the winter snowfall and summer thunderstorms of my northeast life, but each year I understand better how change comes out here. Each week passes in the leaves of plants and the cloudiness of the sky and which vegetables I’m eating, and in the light - whether it’s there when I wake up in the morning, and there when I get home in the evening. Whether I rent a movie and hunker down by five, or sit sipping beers at some patio table until hours before I wake up again.

Today was the second kind of day, and tomorrow will be another, and again on out until October. But tomorrow in particular is a reassuring marker, a little buoy somehow coming around again, right when it was supposed to. I’ve had this odd and embarrassing craving recently for collegesque conversation about the unknown, because it seems to have returned in all its unsettling splendor. People are not making sense to me lately, and I’m not making sense to me either, and I feel a new warmth for the improbable. Because really, how much more improbable could it get than what we’ve got already?

But solstice promises one long, clear, steady day, everything in place for one stretched out splendid moment. All that motion and still things line up.

posted by tortaluga @ 1:57 AM