PAUL WINTER'S WORLD OF LIVING MUSIC: MUSIC OF THE EARTH
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And so you do. This morning, you put the newspaper down and let your eyes go to the window. A red-breasted bird perches on the ledge, watching. The wall of ivy shimmers with pale ripeness. Sunshine slants into the yard, and motes of dust move in the cone of the breeze. Ferns lounge in the shade. Fresh-green branches scratch at the sky. Leaves glisten. For a moment, you attend to the way the world welcomes the longest days of the year. Your part is to take it in.
But the newspaper makes demands of its own. How to square time's invitation to contemplation with the conscription of public sorrow? You lift the paper and resume reading accounts of the latest catastrophe in Iraq. Mass beheadings. The routinization of decapitation marks yet another threshold into horror. Such dismemberment completes the defilement of nature's masterpiece, the human body. Who can do such things? And what are the joys of summer solstice to that?
Drawing your gaze through the window again, the blue sky comes into view -- the heavenly field of cosmic play within which seasons have their meaning. The physical fact that revolutions of the globe around the sun combine with earth's axial rotations creates the ultimate abstraction, which is the simple bliss of outdoor leisure after dinner. Perceptions of the actual spheres and their swirling, from Capricorn to Cancer, elude you. Instead, memory and anticipation take over, free associations of the endless evenings of this special week: friends stopping by, gin-and-tonics on the porch, laughing parents, you and your brothers dashing after the ice cream man, your own children chasing fireflies, the hum of the Red Sox game from windows down the street, every neighborhood you have ever lived in settling into the contentment for which these long days were made. The past and the future kiss.
But what are the benign implications of such salad days to the grip of hunger? The newspaper reasserts itself, a catalogue of distress: financial markets plummeting, illness of birds, US agents in league with warlords, the Pentagon deleting protections of Geneva, American city boys shooting one another, further horrors of the Holy Land, nuclear dread, and always Darfur, the world-historic and world-permitted crime. Anguish defines the age.
Humans must always balance the tension between grave public demands and intensely personal preoccupations. There is reading the newspaper, and there is letting the mind go out the window. But the golden twilights of June want attention paid. You remind yourself that this week's display is of ingenious movements of the planet that you otherwise take for granted. Ironically, the solstice is defined not by intimacy, but distance, for now the sun is as far as it gets from the celestial equator. The resulting length of days points to earth's trustworthiness, for the movement away carries the promise of return. When has the dance of earth and sun ever broken that commitment?
And when has astronomy ever done more for the lifting of the spirit? The suspended moments of time's zenith are sacraments of life's goodness. Haste, duty, and the hassles of work have no admittance here. In the coming week, you will remember with love all those with whom you have found your ease in such suspension -- companions of summer. And in recalling such release, you will look for more. Ironically, this is how you deepen your feeling of responsibility for the world. It is the one thing you have learned: to be at peace is the way to prepare to work for peace.
There is no coping with the heartbreak of the human condition without a nurtured sense of the heart when it is full. It is the business of the summer solstice, through the weave of memory and desire, to nurture that plenitude. That is why, on each day of its approach, you will note the rampant timelessness of evening. In the morning, you will let your eyes drift from the wartime news to the red-breasted bird on the window ledge, to join in its watching.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
Join the Paul Winter Consort and friends to celebrate the Summer Solstice with a dawn concert featuring Tibetan singer Yangjin Lamu at 4.30AM on June 21 2008 in New York City's Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
2008 Summer Solstice Celebration Press Release
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