Ah, summer.
Long days of blue skies, big clouds, green
trees, colorful flowers, warm rain, tall grass, iced coffee in the morning and
Corona beers at night. You got your
flies, mosquitos and bees, sure, but you also have the hummingbirds and
woodpeckers -- the season of the bear, the bat and the beaver, the ant and the
squirrel.
It’s also the season of sweating on the
couch.
According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the northern
summer solstice begins this week, a stretch of long, long days clocking in at
14 hours and 47 minutes, gray moons in the blue evening skies. If we were cabin-bound in northern Inuit
country, then we might be able to see old Sol, for a brief moment, standing
still in the sunny midnight hour. The origin of the word solstice is a combination of sol for “sun” and sistere
which means “stands still.”
According to the Medicine Wheel, Wabun
the Golden Eagle is flying away from his nest-throne and Shawnodese the Coyote
Trickster begins the next three-moon reign, beginning with the paradoxical
Strong Sun Moon. Although considering
that the sun and the moon share the sky during this season, maybe the
Wheelmakers were on to something there.
If I had any of the spirit of Wabun in
me, then I wouldn’t be here right now, in an air-conditioned urban cabin on
some numbered street in just another grid in just another city somewhere along
this great sprawling megalopolis.
No, I’d be high-tailing it to the Big
Horn county of Wyoming, ten-thousand feet up Medicine Mountain, and I’d be
watching the sun rise along its solstice while sitting Indian-style at the
southern cairn of an actual medicine wheel.
Up on Medicine Mountain, there be one of
the largest surviving Medicine Wheels, seventy-five feet in diameter, over eight
hundred years old, perfectly aligned with the northern summer solstice.
Now that’s the kind of entrance that the
Coyote deserves.
If Wabun the Golden Eagle is all eyes
and wing, then Shawnodese the Coyote Trickster is all teeth and heart and, for
better or for worse, all that the teeth devour and all that the heart ignites:
love, hate, fear, sympathy, envy, jealousy, delight, rage, anger, desire, regret,
hunger.
And so, it is only appropriate, that the
Coyote’s three moons are dominated by the family of trees called the Roses.
