Equinoctial Thoughts

It's a little over a week till the autumnal equinox, but the sun is now rising in the notch to the south of the mountain to the east of us, having climbed, since June 21, up and over the mountain from the notch on its northern end, and with the storm blowing in today, the sky is dark and the windchimes busy.

Yesterday, cleaning up a pit I had lined with douglas fir posts left over from building our house, I decided to stand them in a line marking the summer solstice. If you look along the posts in this photo, you can locate the spot on Lake Mountain where the sun quits moving north, stands still for an instant (sol-stice), and then moves south for the winter.

Why does that matter to me? I suppose it matters for the same reason it mattered to everyone who has marked the solstice, whether through standing stones, marks inside rock formations, or whatever means. We are affected by movements of the sun. Short days mean, for me, a return to more depressive moods. I compensate for that, at best, with thoughts of backcountry skiing.

The wind will blow my posts over, balanced on their ends as they are, the seasons will progress as they always have, and I, now in my 60th year, will follow the seasons as long as I can and then follow the posts.