Walpurgisnacht 2006
.: Miðgarðsormr manifesting the blood-gods of the sun :.
666 : DCLXVI : DICIT LVX, "the light speaks"
[A less cropped version of the picture here.]
I stood on top of Enchanted Rock and watched the sun rise on my birthday (May 1st). It was spectacular, the stars slowly faded away until only Venus remained hanging near the horizon, like the Silmaril I know her as, and the sky took on the whole prismatic array of colors on the horizon for a few minutes... and I mean the whole spectrum too, red through violet*, stretching back to the star-clad black of the fading night. I do not recall ever having seen green in a sunrise before... that was nice.
Where the sun intended to rise specifically betrayed itself with a rosy-scarlet glow a few minutes before the first molten arch of the sun's disk opened infinite red-gold over the horizon.
The night before the skies were gloriously clear and you could see an ocean of stars above. Over the course of the night, we saw a fair number of meteors. I think I saw at least five really good ones, and Jeff, who was paying closer attention to the sky probably saw a good number more.
I drank enough mithril starlight last night to know it tastes like blood!
Jeff and I saw a good bit of wildlife too, as you might imagine. Lots of deer, a rabbit, a profusion of turkey vultures, and probably one of the more odd birds have have encountered lately, what looked like a crested caracara (aka Mexican eagle) having breakfast on something dead with a pair of vultures. I have only seen a caracara once before out at San Bernard Wildlife Refuge a number of years back. They are rather interesting looking birds, as you can see below:
example of a crested caracara...
I will likely elaborate more on our adventures later....
* Incidentally, I understand what Jung meant about colors and sunrises/sunsets now.