Solstice in the City
Originally published at The Mossy Skull. Please leave any comments there.
It used to be easy. I could just step out into the garden with my whiskey and corncob pipe of a steamy midsummer night, maybe fiddle about a bit with the maize god statuettes guarding the tomatoes, look up across the hazy cornfields at King Philip’s Rock and pour out a bit of libation to the turning wheel.
Instead, I spent the moments surrounding midnight wandering the side streets east of a walled-off Boston Common, looking up past the evocative rootlike patterns of plinths and facades at the starless sky, smelling the smells of stir-fry and subway exhalations, marveling at the thirty kinds of not-English I heard from passersby.
Here’s this new blog Justin led me to, Next Nature, that deals with the unpredictable “natural” phenomena which arise from human culture. Fascinating stuff. I love this:
Our technological environment
becomes so complex
we start to relate to it
as a nature of its own
Gray Catbird, Dumetella carolinensis, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, MA
Happy Solstice, wherever you are.