Near the top of Hope Point trail with lovely humans (not pictured)
Best evening lit rose ever
There is a lot of light emanating from the sun. It barely dips below the tree-limb horizon, so sometimes we forget when to go to bed. And it is relentlessly sunny — the forest fires burn on, the moss is dusty and the woods bare of mushrooms, and my hair is almost blond.
Peak zenith should be celebrated. About thirty of us trooped singlefile alongside the highway to a bridge over a creek to enact the rites of Troll-stice. We puzzled ye riddles three; we guzzled libations and feasted on fat buttery things; we ornamented each other with glitter to symbolize the sun’s glinting rays; and at midnight we submerged our limbs in the creek to commemorate the cyclical passage of seasons and time and meaningful stuff.
The dandelions know how to make the most of their time, stretching their stalks a foot high, proudly above the feathery horsetail, to nod their at first gloriously golden and now (so swiftly!) wizened gray heads. The salmon, too, make haste through these elastic days and nights of light. Furiously swimming, leaping improbably high and far out of the water, their instinct drives them to their impossibly Sisyphian task to climb treacherous rocky falls. Not infrequently, the foaming white water churns up a ragged orange-pink meat chunk, one of their fellows filleted by the pounding river.
It’s interesting that the salmon exhaust their own lives to spawn subsequent salmon. Not only their upstream exertion but also the nutrients from their carcasses sustain their hatchlings and the biome of the river. The process is simultaneously productive and destructive. I sang a song a few months ago about the inevitable changing of seasons (“Gatekeeper,” by Feist). The buildup (preceding the breakdown) goes:
June, July, and August said,
“It’s probably hard to plan ahead.”
June, July, and August said,
“It’s better to bask in each other.”
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