I am eating potato soup for breakfast, sitting porch side under a gray skied, early summer morning’s after rain. Birds sing and everywhere I look is green. My meal steams, spoon touches tongue, tasting dill, I crack a peppercorn between teeth—heat. At midnight I took a bath and slept naked in my bed and woke without alarm at seven-thirty. I walked around the yard barefoot in wet clover, sipped coffee and read the opening pages of Annie Dillard’s, Holy the Firm:
Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountain split. I wake in god.
She goes on to speak of a lover in her quilt, Someone is kissing me. I open my eyes. She is writing of the Puget Sound in the Pacific. Its waters and islands and light. I delight in similar fashion.
I am considering my soup, grateful to know whose hands gathered its vegetables and herbs, whose minds created its recipe and the kitchen it was prepared in. I think about each person, an array of faces, beating hearts, who are nourishing me on this new day, while much of the world is at war. I feel rich in this placement, at this very moment that has been partly made by countless beautiful people living their lives as authentically as they know how. A deer appears from behind a nearby sequoia stump. It munches on some wild plant while I take a savoring spoonful.
The slow strewn sensual embodiment of waking, touching, tasting, hearing, seeing, feeling, and knowing, this is what I am made for. To commune—to eat and drink and bathe myself in the holiness of the living. We are miracles within miracles. What god do you wake to? With choice, in freedom, when there is no country dropping bombs at your door or ripping loved ones from your grasp, locking them in prisons, what god is your day? Some gods are forced upon us, others are summoned.
This is my Summer Solstice Proclamation and prayer for all:
It is a basic human right to end each day wrapped in soft skin filled with breath and awake to the wild wet earth in prolific growth. To revel in air and water and feel the fire of our core burn brighter. To eat what feeds and listen to what sings, to fuel our heart with the tinder of leaf and laughter, humans connecting with humans connecting and a nature that dawns on us not in war of dominion, but in unfolding revelation.
Full body resonance ripples began with Dillard's words, and continued until the very end.
Your Summer Solstice Proclamation could be printed poetically as a poster, a card, or illustrated and framed. A beautiful, sensate, all inclusive way for us to live deeply nourished and potently alive! Bravo!👏