Welcome, Summer!

With the rising of the sun, today is Summer Solstice; the longest day of light of the year. Most of us welcome in this season with more anticipation than any other. It allows us to play outside and enjoy the light of the sun more often than at any other time of year (in Portland). And yet, I realized for the first time, that the arrival of the most popular season is also the beginning of the return of the darkness. Even though it's only one minute per day, hardly perceptable, it's happening....the arrival of the warmth also brings with it, the return of darkness. And with Winter Solstice...the cold brings the return of the light. Nature is so ironic, yet holds perfect symmetry and cycle within herself. Perhaps we can glean peace from that? Perhaps acknowledge that nothing ("no-thing") is just one thing; good or bad, beautiful or ugly, dark or light, happiness or sadness.

How often do we have some form of external or internal toddler-like tantrum, bitch and complain to our ever-patient friends, or host a solo, self-imposed pity party at the arrival of something unexpected and inconvenient. Or find ourselves in shock sadness as we rail against the departure of something or someone we considered a positive thing in our life? That up until it's loss, if we are totally honest, we have to admit we were deluding ourselves to think that there is any real promise of permanence. Somehow, for what seems like a crazy reason, if you think about it, it all seems so unnatural to us when things "change", yet we pretty much accept and allow Nature to bring both her darkness and light without much of a fight. Humans love watching the sun rise and set; even consider it romantic to sit and witness when it happens in the sky. And yet...we do not peacefully allow our lives the same cycles.

Tonight I will gather in community to celebrate the arrival of this new season. I am so grateful to mark the cycles of the earth and the sky. To be aware of the energies and cycles that surround me, and acknowledge and accept, even embrace, the ways nature has an impact.

I am thankful for the rising awareness of the ways I impact my environment, not only emotionally and spiritually, but increasing in all the physical ways I am being called to consider alternatives to the ways I have previously chosen to live on a daily basis...what I eat, where it comes from, and what it took to get it to me, how I get where I go, what I dispose of. It's a slow process to untie the knot I've created and at times I feel embarrassed and impatient with my progress. The truth isn't attractive and the answers aren't necessarily easy or initially convenient, so it will take time. I accept that. But, with each tiny shift, I'm surprised how in actuality, rather than it being burdensome and inconvenient, I feel more freedom and lightness. The discomfort is not in making the change, but in realizing how blind I was before.

I especially love riding my bicycle to work and taking public transportation. Believe me, I am acutely aware of how weird that makes me, but that's the gift of being in my 40's....I DON'T CARE! In my experience, in judging another, we only darken our own countenance and environment And seeing with compassion and forgiveness bring light and love.

What I notice is more a feeling of connection to the rest of the world and life itself when riding amongst other Portlanders. It's honestly hard to describe, but to contrast, I realize how isolated, even disconnected, I felt when I leave my cookie cutter house with the blinds over the windows and get in my comfortable, climate-controlled car, with the windows up, that is only a few feet from my door and drive to virtually the front door of the office to work with the same few people, who generally live socio-economically similar to better than myself. Then at the end of the workday, I return to my car with my choice of music that drowns out the sounds of life and the world I fly right through without even noticing what and who I passed. Then I walk a couple of feet back to my same 4 walls of routine (not that I don't love the precious people who I share them with).

When I'm on my bike I hear and smell and feel EVERYTHING. The beautiful, the putrid, the unexpected. I'm always surprised by something. Life, death (roadkill), light (morning), dark (sunset), hot, cold, wet (rain), dry. I see the contrasting lifestyles and hearts and minds of people I never even noticed or stopped to consider before. I'm pretty sensitive to others internal happenings, and it's sacred to me how a few moments sitting across from someone I don't even know, or don't even talk to, can rearrange my attitude or perspective, for the better.

So today I celebrate this day speaking of this new awareness; that summer, while warm and sunny, has darkness as a twin. And so, in each of us, let us take time to see and welcome in the irony of this season; and therefore our own irony, our own warmth and our own darkness. Not only internally, in the love that surrounds or eludes us, but also in the external happenings that bring in both warmth and darkness. May you be blessed in it all.......

I ran into this "Blessing" from John O'Donahue this morning that seemed fitting. It is my "Summer Blessing" to you.

"May you know that absence is full of tender presence and that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

May the absences in your life be full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere which holds the presences that have left your life.

May you be generous in your embrace of loss.

May the core well of grief turn into a well of seamless presence.

May your compassion reach out to the ones we never hear from and may you have the courage to speak out for the excluded ones.

May you become the gracious and passionate subject of your own life (I LOVE THAT ONE).

May you not disrespect your mystery through brittle words of false belonging.

May you be embraced by God in whom dawn and twilight are one, and may your belonging inhabit its deepest dreams within the shelter of the Great Belonging.


Have an amazing summer........ Alder