Summer Solstice

I spent the long evening at a poetry gathering at a house called Sunnyfield up in the hills about Emmitsburg.  Lovely, peaceful place.  Horses grazing on the lawn, long shadows of the trees, robins, wood thrushes and pewees calling.

Here are some Solstice poems and thoughts. Not mine, but meaningful to me:

Over hill, over dale - from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

A wood near Athens. A Fairy speaks.
 

Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire
I do wander every where,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green:
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dew-drops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits: I’ll be gone;
Our queen and all her elves come here anon.

"O most honored Greening Force,

You who roots in the Sun;
You who lights up, in shining serenity, within a wheel
that earthly excellence fails to comprehend.

You are enfolded
in the weaving of divine mysteries.

You redden like the dawn
and You burn: flame of the Sun."
-  Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Viriditas

 "This is June, the month of grass and leaves . . . already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me.  I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late.  Each season is but an infinitesimal point.  It no sooner comes than it is gone.  It has no duration.  It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought.  Each annual phenomena is reminiscence and prompting.  Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other.  We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact.  A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature.  Now I am ice, now I am sorrel.  Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind."

- Henry David Thoreau, Journal, June 6, 1857