SUMMER SOLSTICE FEELING

Last week on June 21st the Summer Solstice marked the moment at which days in the Northern Hemisphere begin to shorten, while in the Southern Hemisphere they grow longer. During certain parts of the year it seems I can sense the changes taking changing each day, but not now. The Summer Solstice feeling is as strong today as it was a week ago.

At dawn and dusk a certain kind of dwarf cicada calls, setting the stage for the Summer Solstice feeling. Its call isn't raucous and penetrating like that of big ones, but rather it's a prolonged, subdued ringing that's echoic, watery, ethereal. The Turquoise-browed Motmot at this time also might issue low, ghostly, whoow-whoow calls.

At breakfast, the Sun rising across the papaya field below the hut is a weakly defined, silvery luminescence in the morning's light fog. But even in this tentative light, curves and margins of dew-wet leaves and stems of dark vegetation all around are highlighted with random-shaped puddles, speckles and arcs of muted colorlessness that change shape, and come and go as the Sun rises diagonally. It's as if the Sun at this season, self-conscious about changing it's course so drastically, unsettles all it touches with auras of impermanence.

As soon as the Sun rises higher and burns off the mist, though, then suddenly the feeling becomes the opposite of what it's been so far, unrelentingly stinging exposed skin and flooding everywhere with such brilliance that you can't look at it. Now the surrounding vegetation is all hard greenness and black shadows. This quick changing from extreme to extreme also is the Summer Solstice feeling, the feeling of mingling extremes.

But, of course, this whole matter of there being a Summer Solstice feeling is purely an invention of my bicameral human brain, one side coming up with stories and explanations for the other side's jumbled harvest of sensory stimuli. Beyond the framework of existing in one Earthly hemisphere instead of the other, and thinking about it and forming impressions about it that go no further than my own head, there really is no Summer Solstice feeling, nothing.

So, the Summer Solstice feeling -- which for seventy years has meant a great deal to me -- is all in my own head. And yet, I'm sitting here wondering whether what's going on with me might be an echo of what the Universal Creative Impulse does all the time, if it's true that She's created the Universe so that She may know Herself, which I like to believe.

If so, then instead of limiting Herself to either the Northern or Southern Hemisphere of the little planet Earth circling an unexceptional star in one of untold billions of galaxies, I'm betting She's populated the Universe with all forms of mentality from which to experience all forms of being.

In this context, I feature myself with these thoughts, feelings and insights about the Summer Solstice feeling as reporting for duty in the service of the Universal Creative Impulse. I am Her loyal nerve ending, stationed exactly here and now, doing my best to sharpen my perceptions, and by experiencing, feeling and thinking, faithfully reporting back to Headquarters.