Cosmic Reflections

If I’ve become a Westerner, it’s because of the Light. The clarity that comes with dry air enlivens my body, mind, and spirit. Yet this summer solstice finds us driving East, into the increasing haze of humidity co-created by the thickening vegetations and stands of trees. By the time we hike half a mile along the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains, we are acutely aware that we are east of the Mississippi: our skin is sopping with sweat!
We’re scheduled to attend the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations in Charlotte, where I’ll participate in a formal ministry retirement ceremony (June being the season for commemorating achievement), and savor the companionship of the seminary classmates who have remained close friends throughout these 18 years. That I knew Milt before I met any of them seems very odd, a sense offset by also reconnecting with a dear friend I roomed with at earlier General Assemblies; she did actually meet him back in 1985, though doesn’t quite remember.
It is all as a Time Warp, even as the sun ‘stands still’ (solstice) for three days before the earth turns towards winter.
Though now it’s most definitely summer! The heat and humidity on Hilton Head Island keeps us inside my daughter’s air conditioned home, playing with her daughters (ages 7 and 5), or drives all us into the bathtub warm ocean for relief. By the time we get to Florida for an extended visit with Milt’s son and daughter in law, the humid heat has muddled my mind. My body wants to shut down and sleep for much of the afternoon.
It is just as humid when I get up in the middle of the night to sit on the beach watching for a female loggerhead sea turtle to haul herself out of the ocean and dig a nest in the dwindling dunes. I’ve tried this before, back when I lived in South Carolina
I still don’t catch a glimpse of the actual event, but the next day do manage to see the distinctive tracks coming up from the sea, ending abruptly on the sand, a full body pressing, then the tracks resuming with a u-turn back towards the sea, guided by the moon’s light on the waves. In a month or so, her hatchlings too will be drawn from sand dune to sea by the same light…IF artificial ones don’t distract them and cause them to use up their limited ‘fuel’ by heading in the wrong direction.
Humans are asked to shut off the lights in their dune hugging homes during turtle nesting season, but not everyone complies. A volleyball court has been staked off just feet away from the orange caution tape delineating the newest sea turtle nesting site; no wonder the species is facing extinction.
Watching the Fourth of July fireworks on the same beach, I find myself weeping for a day of declaration that ALL species have the right to freely live out their evolutionary destiny.
After all, we’re all creatures of the same light that burst forth some fourteen billion years ago at the beginning of Time!
As David Suzuki puts it, now “Life on this planet is conferred by the fortuitous generosity of a rather undistinguished medium star of a type called a yellow dwarf, one of the 400 billion stars n the Milky Way Galaxy. From where we stand, it is a total marvel,” (Sacred Balance, 2007).
I think of this as the emergent Truth of Light, and it becomes my summer meditation.