Beginnings

All things are beginning. If the wheel of the year seems like a constant returning, retreading the same paths, then we must also be aware that this spinning wheel is always throwing off sparks. New starts, shooting off at a tangent and beginning to spin on their own.

It is appropriate that I am beginning this while approaching the summer solstice. It never feels like midsummer, or the point where everything starts to get dark again. It feels like the high point of velocity; like the peak of the roller coaster before you start the fantastic plummet toward the ground.

Midsummer is not the top of the wheel, where from here on out it's all woe and dark and ah, life is ending and shrinking again. No more than midwinter means an end to the death and the silence of snow. Midsummer is the escape-velocity moment of the year. This is when we take the things that have been spinning with us, getting ready to go--the flowers waiting to be pollinated, the year's work, the fledglings, the projects--and fling them out, using all the momentum of the frantic bursty growth of spring to heave them skyward. From there they find their own orbits, or continue on into the distance, burning brightly, and through all the rest of summer we watch them grow and fly. We bask in the ripening fruit and the glow of the sun, even as we're aware that the rest of the descent is waiting.

The note struck at midsummer is the echo that calls us back from the dead lands in midwinter.