Summer Solstice, some thoughts

Ten years ago when Ethel was a puppy and I was learning that you make hay in Tasmania with a jumper on…

It’s the summer solstice, or it will be tomorrow at 3am. I’m sitting in the dawn chorus, it’s just gone 5am. The moon is still high and full. The frogs, who never slept, are ticking and croaking their way into the day and the air is swelling with bird song. The night was busy. There are sheep in yards waiting for someone to have a moment to take them back to their paddock, and J had let them out to mow down the grass around the sheds overnight. He’d let Monte, our old grey pony, out too. All night the work dogs had cussed and cursed at both pony and sheep. Poor Monte, he can go back to his paddock soon. He’s done his spring penance of three weeks in the sheep yards, but now summer is here and the sweet grasses and clover will be soon safe for him to graze. The morning, without barking dogs or the moan of the wind, feels like a kindness. I’m aware we are at the year’s hinge.

*

Once, long ago in the time before children, I sat on a stoney beach on the edge of Prince William Sound in Alaska. Someone in our group had remembered the solstice date and at midnight we’d watched the sun sit on the horizon and tremor and then lift again. It was June of course, not December. The air had a tautness to it. The water of the sound was still. In front of me a sea otter sculled on its back watching me watching it. To the left was the tongue of a glacier and in the bay floated chunks of ice. We were halfway into a month long kayaking expedition and the world was soft and kind. That we had just endured thirteen day of continuous, torrential rain made the moment even more extraordinary, but I don’t think I consciously thought, you will remember this night for the rest of your life. I did feel a sense of awe.

*

Last week we, that is Tasmania, had a day of sudden and brutal tragedy. Six children have died. Most of you will have seen the coverage, so I won’t go on. I know my reaction was shared over and over. Goosebumps, a wave of nausea, disbelief, fear, and unbearable sadness even as I walked on through waving grasses, beneath the song birds in the most benevolent season I have ever seen. The careless shrug of life.

As I walked the turning circle I listened to the poet Jane Hirshfield talking to Krista Tippett. They were talking about how to live in this world and it seemed the conversation I needed to hear. I came inside and looked up the transcription of the episode. Hirshfield says:

I have been given this existence, these years on this Earth, to accept what has come into my lifetime — wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness. I must take them. I must find a way to live in this world. You can’t refuse it. And along with the difficult is the radiant, the beautiful, the intimacy with which each one of us enters the life of all of us and figures out, what is our conversation? What is my responsibility? What must be suffered? What can be changed? How can I meet this in a way which both lets me open my eyes the next day and also, perhaps, if I’m lucky, can be of service?

*

Last Friday night I drove J’s dinner out to him. He was on the tractor making hay. I drove over the creek crossing, the wheels on the ute spinning on the rocks, and then I followed the creek out to where he was baling. It was a beautiful still evening, the threat of a storm made even a dash home to have dinner to risky. It was seven weeks since I’d crossed the creek and the season has shifted into summer. I drove through a sea of grass to where J had mown a meadow. He turned the tractor off and we stood under the great dome of sky. On the fence post a pair of Dickie’s pipets piped their warning at us. Except for the great belching tick of the tractor, all around us was peace. The making of hay is banking in grass. It’s an acknowledgement of a ledger, an acceptance that though we are now in a season of plenty, there will come a time when the ground will be bare and the creeks empty.

*

In that northern summer, twenty-five years ago, we spent the whole of it outside. My body changed, hardened, grew stronger, more resilient. The long light made time stretch and I thought I would always now, live this way. When the days started to shorten I remember being shocked at being in the half light, I wondered what was wrong with my eyes, but it was just that the sun had sunk and I had forgotten what darkness was. I’m thinking about this now, on the edge of Christmas, at the turning of the year, and I’m hoping for us all that we can accept both the light and dark and bank the moments of awe for times when the sun has gone.

I’ll leave you with Wendell Berry and his day-blind stars in his poem The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

mm x

Reading

This fascinating article on Jane Campion creative process behind her new film The Power of the Dog. Loved this from writer and coach Adrienne Ferreira’s blog about the best and worst of gift giving. I wish I’d seen her call out. I could have added a texta drawing of a vege garden that I was apparently going to receive for my birthday…still waiting. I’m half way through Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence. Erdrich is one of my favourite writers but this novel is not quite so tight as some of her others, I even wondered if she had a new editor a few times. But the main character, Tookie, is brilliant.

Anne Carson has a new book and this conversation Anne Carson Punches a Hole Through Greek Myth in Freeman’s between British artist Tarcita Dean and Carson is totally intriguing.

Listening

Here’s the Krista Tippett interview with poet Jane Hirshfield. I think I mentioned George Saunders has a newsletter. Here he is talking about it on longform and I was so relieved to know he has an actual editor for his newsletter….can you imagine how blissful that would be…anyway, an interesting conversation.

Potter and all round creative genius Ruth Bruten’s Christmas play list is so so wonderful with lots of music outside the normal Christmas box.

And I watched this extraordinary film, Mind over Mountain that my brother sent me.

Have a wonderful Christmas Sitters, and I’ll see you back here in early January.