my mother turned 75 years-old yesterday
and that’s all i know,
about her
anymore
One experience of living rurally — without any obstructions of buildings or infrastructure — and with a full southern exposure out my front door, generous windows and an unencumbered view of all four cardinal directions — it’s like i am in the center of a beautiful compass at all times — is, that i have been able to observe and better understand the obliquity of the ecliptic:
marking the farthest northeastern point of the Sun’s eager rise and the farthest northwestern point of the Sun’s leisurely set at the Summer solstice with my own eyes — the Sun making a deep, high horseshoe arc on those long Summer days,
and to watch the Sun’s progression/regression daily,
and, to witness how at the Winter solstice, the Sun just sleeps in, lazily rising in southeastern Sky, just barely making an appearance for us in the northern latitudes — offering us the shallowest, little arc of light before quickly bedding down again in the southwestern Sky;
Darkness is so precious in the Summer and the light is so precious in the Winter. The darkness is so gloriously abundant in the Winter and the light is so gloriously a abundant in Summer;
i am so grateful and privileged to have experienced this solar panorama and time lapse in real life for eight years now, after living many decades in a major North American city — Chicago, without it;
and,
below is my favorite ever foto to share on the Solstice: Attila Kálmán faithfully and wondrously captured the obliquity of the ecliptic — his camera tracking the Sun’s path from a point on the Northern Hemisphere of Earth from Summer to Winter Solstice in 2012.
and a few of my own favorite Summer Solstice experiences:
Billionaire JB Pritzker, the current Governor of the State of Illinois in an annual constitutionally mandated “State Of The State” address of February 19, 2025, questioned the near and long-term State of the Union — of the United States of America,
the relevant paragraphs are excerpted below with a link to the full transcript:
Continue reading “The time is NOW for applied anti-fascist actions of resistance and desistance and acts of courage —firstly, by elected and sworn state and local leadership”Winter Sky Sunrises and endless Horizon, Mountains, Forests, Prairies and Waters were traded for cities, skyscrapers and highways, built and named by corporations, governments and militias to populate with executives, politicians, engineers, administrators, marketers, managers, soldiers and subordinates — the wealth of the corporate-nation city-state dependent on the slow, then fast, destruction of all the Land and Waters and Beings on Earth
the Earth, on which i stood to take this photo this very Morning — and, the Atmosphere, which made the Trees, the Snow, the Clouds, and the Sky colors possible at all, this very Morning.
steel towers, stone temples, asphalt streams, and concrete rivers built to ensure that our feet rarely touch the Earth, that our eyes rarely witness Living and Being;
that we look up or that we look down, but, that we barely look around, that we rarely look within and that we that we never look beyond — so that we forget to remember.
the cities were designed and engineered for doing — which is the opposite of Being;
doing, which is a euphemism for undoing;
undoing, which is actually destruction — and which is ultimately,
a forgetting.
Forgetting to remember where we came from.
Forgetting to remember what we are made of.
Forgetting to remember what we were made for.
Our Elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the Earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning. For the passing of Polar Bears, the Silence of Cranes, for the Death of Rivers and the Memory of Snow.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
from her Northland College 2015 commencement address
a sweet spot, a warm, quiet evening,
of a too-soft winter here,
on & of the good Earth,
that tempts the comfortable one
to flirt with forgetting
the hard totality
of this hot and cold, man-made,
loud and brutal World.
if you’re seeing this, you’re alive,
though dying — no matter your age, health, relative safety, relative comfortability —
on this living, though suffering and actively dying, planet
Earthlings and Earth together in a protracted hospice
right now, in these brief years, these grief years,
we are the “ever-living ghosts of what once was”
a “was” that most all of us alive this morning have never known as lived experience — save for the untouched tribes — 10,000 Uncontacted Peoples — 10,000 unsystematized, “uncivilized”
and the Ocean, and the few, still-standing Ancient One Trees; the untouched Desert, and the Mountains — even the youngest of them — The Tetons and The Himalayas, know what it “was” to be alive.
we are mere ghosts, walking dead.
aurora borealis
as experienced from the land i occupy, Michigan, North America, May 10th 2024
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 