A Love Letter To The Summer Solstice

We are made of the same atoms, separated once upon a time, and reunited briefly in chance encounters once the summer starts.

A word of advice: if you read this piece 〜 s l o w l y 〜 you will enjoy it better than reading it fastly.

I have mixed feelings about the sun waking me obscenely early every day.

My eyelids are glued shut. My body is slouching. And yet, there is not one season in the year when I feel more alive. I remember we are in the midst of summer and I forget about my morning crankiness. Who needs sleep when I feel the life around me vibrating, the Sun’s constant presence pulsating through my veins?

Solstice = from the Latin solstitium, from sol sun + -stit- standing or stationary.

The days when the sun seems to stop moving, when it’s always present in the sky.

At the other end of the day, the dusk at sundown seems endless. The day slowly falls into night, but a bit of light always clings to the evening, well into the night. ‘Midnight blue’ is a different shade this time of the year. Like a dark room whose door doesn’t close all the way, a thin ray of sun lags behind on this side of the earth almost all night long. It’s the Summer Solstice!

The veil between night and day is see-through thin.

I sleep with the window open, knowing that at dawn I will be woken up by a dozen tiny swallows circling the house in front and screaming as if chased by the Sun God himself. One wonders if during the summer our bodies should not acquire a certain quality by which they don’t need to sleep. Look at these insomniac birds, for example.

The inside and the outside, they become one.

We walk mostly barefoot: either on the floors of our homes or in gardens or beaches. Tile floors to cool our feet. Wooden floors to keep us comfy. Grassy gardens to tickle our toes and ground our soles. Powdery beaches, to gently massage the skin on our feet.

The line between being dressed or undressed is thin - just like the fabric of our skimpy clothes. Both day and night are one shade lighter as if God turned up the ‘brightness’ filter on the image. Our bodies don’t stay dry for too long in the summer. We’re either sweating or plunging in the sea or a pool.

We consume more liquids than heavy, solid foods.

Gazpacho every single day. The only place where you don’t see gazpacho during summer is in your coffee. Watermelon gazpacho, salmorejo, regular gazpacho, gazpacho suave without cucumber, ajo blanco - a variety made up of ground almonds and garlic.

The magical quality of summer is that it slows everything down.

Everything is in slow motion. Insects seem to fly so sluggishly that their transparent wings appear in sight. The summer stretches out into endless lazy days. The wind sits still. The cars pass by in silence, like a funeral procession meant to not disturb the spirits. Patches of grass slowly brun out scorched by the rays of the sun at noon. Biting from a juicy, cold nectarine offers temporary relief from the heat, only to make us fall into idleness once again afterward. The torrid heat creeps into my mind filling it with a cloud of sticky cotton candy. I cannot think, I cannot do, I cannot move. I just am.

I am woken up from the drowse by the bomb splash of a neighbor plunging into the pool.

I find a place in the shade to set my lounge chair, and I sit down. If you look closely enough, there are various ants around me already, maybe even climbing upward from my ankle.

A microscopic bug with white skin and invisible antennas crawls its way across the page of the book I’m reading.

Bright pollen from the flowers nearby reaches my nose and penetrates my skin.

On a cloudy day, I might feel just a couple of drops from the sky drying on my warm arm. Or if they hit the pages of my book, lightly moistening them.

The insects, the raindrops, the flowers, they all leave an imperceptible imprint on my skin, permanently mixing their world with mine. But theirs and mine are the same world. And there, in the dead of summer, I am shown how we are all one. How we blend easier when we spend more time outside than inside.

I am reminded that we are made of the same atoms, separated once upon a time, and reunited briefly in chance encounters once the summer starts.

Soon enough the colder months will arrive and we will draw once again a sharp and definitive separation between our bodies and our surroundings.

Not just with thick clothes and gloves, but also with the walls of our homes, the windows of our cars buzzed shut. We will be separated not just physically but also spiritually from nature. From our own source. The reason is simple: we need a warm environment to survive. But we will be isolated again, shut off from nature’s elements. We will be in survival mode, less touched by the leaves of trees, less attuned to the insects. We will be a dolphin at the zoo waiting for better days out in the ocean. Until the next time summer arrives.