Reaching at the Solstice

Walk down the hill along the dirt road from the meadow to the village. The canopy provides a fully obfuscating tunnel for you now, a green haven hiding an abundance of insect and animal life. At the edge of the lake in the village, you will see the black tadpoles sunning in the shallows, enjoying the safety of the grasses partially submerged at the shore. You may, out of the corner of your eye, catch a glint of silver. A school of thousands upon thousands of tiny fish forming an imperfect sphere at the surface, turning gently to reveal their silver underbellies in the June light.

The lake runs through a small old spillway behind what was the fork shop, the smithy that made pitchforks long ago, and becomes a brook. It is hard to see from the road however, as a riot of buttercups and maiden pink threatens to spill from the banks into it, making you wonder what would happen if they did. Would the brook mix them and their colors, turning a fantastic frothy orange as it meanders through the rest of the village, past the First Congregationalist Church, down into the wetlands?

Your musing may be interrupted by the hooting of the teens

jumping from the bridge. They have been out of school for a week now and the world feels open before them here just before the zenith of summer. There may be jobs waiting and responsibilities arriving soon enough, but those alien things feel profane to think of here, belonging to another much distant season that will surely never catch up to the young people as they dive from the posts on the bridge. Today, the eve of the summer solstice, belongs to wet hair and sunburnt shoulders, to beater cars parked haphazardly nearby, to the simple certainty that there is nowhere else they are required to be. They clamber up the railing boards, hesitate atop the slanted posts for but a moment, and leap into the dark below to the cheers of their friends. It is not a grand leap, not some overpass with tragic tales or a dramatic cliff accompanied by a legendary rope swing. The sound of their triumph echoes across the lake and bounces off the hills all the same, a green and vibrant litany of vitality.

Good June is made for such musing, such dreams. It is made for you to linger by the old dams and brooks and lakesides and wonder at silly things. Amid the musings however, you cannot escape the marrow-deep bone-knowing that you are in the thick of it now, positively surrounded by life. The tadpoles in the shallows are growing legs, and the silver cloud of minnows grows, ever invading the imperceptible, dark deep. The brook that once powered the old mill continues to feed, feed, feed the veritable soup of life in the land below that is not quite grass and not quite pond but some secret thing that we have names for but do not fully know.

The red-winged blackbirds shout from the nearby cattails, the swallows wheel about in pursuit of insects, and somewhere beneath all the floating mats of vegetation turtles slide from the warmth of sun-baked logs into the cool water below. Every stem, every leaf, every square inch of mud is positively occupied.

Growth now presses against growth.

Roots reach deeper.

Wings stretch and strengthen.

Yes. The green world, the natural world, has reached the brief but glorious point where it has jumped its banks, pressed and passed some threshold we cannot see. Here at the eve of the solstice, the zenith of the year, we now see the brook crowded by flowers and hear the laughter echoing off trees and feel the heavy green canopy overhead as the shadows lengthen and arrive long after the work of the day is through. Everything now reaches for its fullest expression.

You stand now amid it all, all the life and all the glory. You must know, however, that you are not an outside observer looking in.

You too are now reaching.