Summer Solstice 2024

 

*outside, it is still dark - and I want to sleep*

I hit the snooze button to try to slip back into dreams...

 

Get up, get up - you'll miss it - the spirit animal tugs at me, it's not my dog, she's downstairs sleeping, but it does the trick as good as any real nose

 

ten more minutes, for the 101 year old woman to tell me what I did wrong with the brown sugar, oh, she's not going to, I have to figure it out myself... 

 

 

pull myself out of bed, remember it is the day, assemble myself and heat up a cup of coffee, stagger out into the already bird-chirping sky-lightening world, long after the moment I would normally push myself out into the world on this day - which is usually before the full veil of dark lifts, when I am still uncertain of even where to put a foot down, much less my wits

 

I think about how I have 'two tries' this year, solstice, and my birthday, days following each other, to see the world as this - and I wonder if I will use both of them, if that is what this is for, comparison...

 

But I am here, moving through the world - and ready to see what it has brought me here for at this moment. And a bird passes overhead, up above the power lines above me, as I am admiring the pale blue light of sky... long before actual sunrise, before any pinkening has come to it. And as I walk, make the turns as I am using to making them - it strikes me at one moment all this sense of scale of the environment, as the colors begin to resolve themselves into pink mimosas and yellow rudbeckia - as the gray of the road and the green of the forest separates into layered and tiered colors...

 

I walk home even before true dawn, look back at the road one time to see the pink fingers coming across the sky - my alarm has not even rung yet - I step into the house and grab up some pens, sit with my dog on the porch and try to capture this - yes, I am small in the world, and it is in motion, and I am here to experience it.

 a toad at my front door

 The 'Five Glyphs' from the poem The Turning of the June posted on this site yesterday.  I went back and got a photo.  The hawk was still there, but she would not let me photograph her - flew off screeching into the deep woods (below), and did not come back.

 The sunlight was illuminating the backsides of the trees - I cannot capture with the camera what it feels like to be shone through thousands of shadows of leaves the particles of light shimmering in the moving air... all with the dew of morning.  I see light and air currents differently than many - I have deduced over the course of my lifetime. It is like prismatic, but green.

The lespedeza and the feathery seeds of the grasses

Walking in the beauty with Daphne, as the sun rises

Even the red grasses are singing with the light, in their different way.  I love the interplay of the red and the soft mossy sage green, each reflecting differently and shining with the water differently, as well.

 The golden caught so beautifully here

and the very soft feather edges of this grass made me bend down and take a look.  It is wispy and thread-like

january journals #5 calico at sunrise

The morning light has come upon us. The birds are shrieking like cats out in the cedar trees. My calico is watching them, telling me the jerks and tells of their heads with her eyes. A silent pastime fit for a winter morning bundled within our nest

Morning whiskers claiming my scissors, my pens, every angled surface as her very own, rubbing her chin down along each line and purring loudly.  She jerks her head back as a blue jay swoops down into the leaves in the yard.  Small quivers happening at her jaw as she wishes to warble but does not want the prey to hear.  A tightening of claws on the edge of the seat and back legs start to pump.  Tail twitches.  The bird takes flight.  A shared glance between us, and she resettles to her claim.  Calico at sunrise in winter light.
 

I have an idea for the sunlit attic scene in one of my short stories to think about today - see if I can get it started.  I have to schedule something with a contractor for tomorrow - hoping he will call me back.  But for the moment it is off to get ready for town and then after church the rest of the day will come as it will.

I am still very glad that the injury from dropping the tile was not bad.  In fact, my hands hurt as much from carrying it as my foot does from dropping it.  Another thing to be thankful for.

When the Sun

When the Sun is up over the horizon, but not yet over the rooftops, and all you can see directly before you are shadows and dark branches, but behind them, through the winter scape, you can see the light.  You can see the light that is shining bright and golden, making the sky a glorious blue, a light that, once you are in it, will feel warm upon your shoulders and your face.  The sun is up over the horizon.  It is only a little bit longer.  The darkness is going away.

   

Playing with the way the lights cataract through the branches, lighting up details and others in shadow.  The first picture was my view while making coffee, and the words accompanying it began to spill out so I let them get down to the page.

Wrote this one the other day, and made the picture today when she was still a minute again

Bluetick
My hound her stomach growls
it sounds like a cat warbling hello
and having disturbed herself, she shifts her long limbs
kicking each back leg out into a stretch
black ears and dappled coat salt and pepper gray
she bends her grizzled nose above her loose jowls
which have been drooling on the pillow
yawning, surveying, seeing not her quarry
then she curls into a ball
tucking her lips carefully over leg and tail
nose still twitching
in what she deems a more comfortable position
to grumble and growl
while dreaming of cornered woodchucks from years ago 

 

Sunrise

Stained glass looking colors behind the trees

Sunrise

the sunrise this morning was beautiful

The Geeky Girl Reads:
Althaea root, (marshmallow) which is in the soap I like. Wiki-crawled from there through --> Asparagine amino acid, --> Aspartic acid then off to looking at amino acids in general. Better yet, Richters online catalogue (in Canada) sells the seeds.