The Wonder

The Perseids are strong tonight.

I mean, it’s early: 9 pm. The Sun is only just down, but it’s a clear night with a quarter Moon and after midnight, there should be a vivid meteor shower, perhaps as many as one every minute or even less.

The night air is warm and still. There are crickets, but they are dwindling as the season progresses. By October, there will be only a faint, lonely, slow chirp.

I gathered with friends yesterday: the Northern California Atheopagan affinity group, AKA the Live Oak Circle. We had a Dimming celebration, drank cider and ate apple pie, poured a libation at the roots of a fruit-laden apple tree. We named our individual early harvests, as well as remembering all the accumulated harvest we enjoy as humans: the art, the culture, the science, the technology, the accumulated history. Sang. Enjoyed a fire.

For me, this early harvest has been pretty amazing. Landed the permanent executive director job at work, published my third book. Helped to organize the upcoming Suntree Retreat, which I am so looking forward to, and which I hope will round out a beautiful Harvest season in September.

We will have many hot days yet, but tonight feels like autumn, with the still, warm air, the anticipatory sense of darkness coming on. Soon, it will be piles of vegetables and grapes…not long after, pumpkins and bones.

How quickly time goes.

One of the ways I think of the wheel of the year is as a description of the stations of a human life, beginning with birth at the winter solstice. By my reckoning, that makes Dimming the Sabbath of middle age: a time to celebrate people at the height of their power and skill, to recognize the beauty of middle-aged people in the community. That’s my station right now, just a few years shy of crossing over into elderhood.

Again, by my reckoning.

I feel such a richness in my life right now. So many beautiful people, meaningful and creative work, communities close and far. And beyond that, always: the Wonder.

Those stars. That Moon. Those burning, blazing meteors, falling from a comet’s debris to Earth.

That sky, going out to always and forever.