In summer, the dark is a beautiful thing: soft, cool, gentle. At this time of year, we don’t get full dark, without even the faintest glow in the western sky, until after 11 PM. On these nights leading up to the summer solstice, true darkness arrives with midnight.
Last night was just a little bit darker than most.
The new moon arrived with the first faint glow of dawn yesterday — in my people’s way, the Blooming Moon, sometimes called the Flowering Moon. Our relatives a little further west, where summer effectively arrives a little earlier, and the fruits and flowers with it, call it the Strawberry or Berry Moon, which for us comes in what the dominant culture calls July. Here at Red Willow, months and moons bear different names, but last night was perhaps the deepest dark of this summer solstice season.
Tonight, the moon begins its waxing crescent phase, illumination no more than one percent, so the astronomers tell us. But one percent is more than zero, and tonight, there will be a crescent to light the dark.
In summer, the days pass rapidly. It seems to be even more the case here than in other places where I’ve lived, a product of our monsoonal weather patterns. When the daylight hours are broken up in the middle by continuous lines of passing storms, sunlight veiled and temperature plunging until the sunset hours, it feels as though there is precious little of “summer” to be had.
And here, the nights are hot . . . until they’re not: nights too warm to fall sleep without open windows, only to awaken in the darkest hours, shivering, because the mercury has plunged twenty or thirty degrees.
Now, with the waxing moon, we rotate too ever closer to the sun.
Cultures the world over have long imagined links between the phase of the moon and the change of the seasons. This is never truer than at the solstices, summer and winter alike: a full moon falling on the night in question seems portentous; so, too, does a new moon and the absence of light.
This year, the summer solstice falls four days after the full moon. Its light will be distinctly on the wane, no hidden harbingers in the symbol of a negative crescent, the dark arc along its right face. But the shortest night of the year — in the old way, its literal midpoint — holds other magic.
June begins with a difficult marker here, and this year, there are new losses. But at a more fundamental level, that of the Earth’s respiration, her heartbeat, this week begins a cycle both wonderful and wondrous: the longest days of the year, the shortest nights, the warmest winds, a world seemingly wrapped in silken light and velvet dark.
And in less than two weeks, our view to the east will be one of jet and mulberry and pearl.
I looked everywhere for Wings’s photo of the full moon in a wine-soaked sky, but it’s apparently buried in a flash drive with only numbers for a name. Unlike the moon-phase series above, this one happens to be my own, but it’s virtually identical to his: one of a pearl set against velvet, a solitary adornment for the rich deep robes of the summer earth and sky.
In just under two weeks, we shall be revisited by it.
For tonight, the dark will be a little less black, the light a little less distant than the improbable shimmer of the stars. Tonight, we shall be granted a crescent to light the dark.
~ Aji
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