This weekend is another one of those landmark weekends that gives us an excuse to stop for a moment and think about how the year has gone and what lies ahead. Tomorrow is the summer solstice marking the longest day in the year.
As we now know it takes around 365 days, give or take a little bit, for the earth to travel around the sun. But its not all plain sailing. As well as travelling over 60,000 miles an hour the earth also spins on its own axis at around 1000 mph whilst also doing it’s own dance tilting one way then another towards and away from the sun. Is it any wonder we are all slightly unbalanced at times?
At 9.24am tomorrow the Northern Hemisphere will be at its most pronounced tilt towards the sun marking the summer solstice. Summer, a season of long days and hopefully some sunny weather. It then, hopefully, starts a 6 month journey tilting back in the opposite direction leading to the winter solstice on 21st December.
I say hopefully. The earth has been doing this for thousands of years already so the chances are it will continue for the foreseeable future. In the past humans knew all about the change in the seasons but worried that what they did and how they acted could make a difference. What if they offended whoever made the decision about whether summer would return after a long cold winter?
Maybe this conundrum was more important for our ancestors around the winter solstice. Their experience and stories told them that no matter how hard a winter might have been spring and summer usually came eventually… but you don’t want to take any chances do you?
Right in the middle of winter people would gather to light bonfires and candles in the hope that the summer would return again and with the exception I suppose of the Ice Age they were not disappointed.
Science has taken away some of the guess work for the change in the seasons. It is now possible to go online and find out the exact moment of a future solstice or an eclipse and that is truly amazing, but it doesn’t totally take away the mystery and the awe inspiring brilliance of how our solar system just works.
So we know that tomorrow, here in Swansea, the sun will rise at 4.57am and set at 21.36pm, that’s nearly 17 hours of daylight and compares with just under 8 hours back at the Winter Solstice last December. The change happens so slowly every single day that we don’t notice. Just before Christmas it felt hard to imagine long summer evenings with Wimbledon and Cricket and now it feels like the winter will never return.
It’s a bit like that when we see old friends that we haven’t seen for a long time. I have recently been to a number of funerals where I have bumped into old friends from school I haven’t seen in decades. It takes a little while to peel back the years to recognise who they were. I always go away thinking how old they look…then I realise so do I?
Seven Years ago….
This weekend has already been a time for reflection and celebration. My favourite granddaughter had a birthday. I always call her my favourite granddaughter because all the rest of my grandkids are boys!!! I have known her since the day she was born. In fact I’ve known her longer than that, I’ve known her since the moment her parents brought the pictures of their ultrasound scan.
I remember holding her in my arms on the day she was born, just the way I held her mother in my arms all those years before. I remember how Covid tried it’s best to rob us of those precious moments as she grew but I was grateful that I got to see her everyday even if we were socially distanced.
There have been first teeth and first words and new brothers and cousins and each day she has changed. Just like the movement in the seasons those changes have been so small that I didn’t notice at the time. It’s only when I look back at the pictures from her previous birthdays I can see how she has grown. That little bundle is now a young lady with a mind and will of her own. In some ways I miss the baby she was, but this is the way it has always been, and I look forward to the changes that lie ahead with excitement.
Which brings me back to considering how we consider the past and maybe more importantly the future. Our ancestors worries were whether the sun would return after winter. Today we have different but similar worries about what lies ahead for us and our loved ones. The thing is we don’t take the lessons from history that maybe we should because looking back at events we know the outcome from the start.
We study World War 2 but know that D-Day was a success, that it was the start of the end of that human tragedy. What is difficult for us is to put ourselves in the place of those going through it at the time, the people hoping and praying for that to be the outcome.
I recently came across an entry in my dad’s diary from 6th June 1944.
D-Day. Heard on 8am news. Electrical atmosphere. What happens now?
The truth is, just like my dad back in 1944, we don’t know ‘what happens now’. Even if it feels we are fighting against all the odds, I will believe that the future will be a good one. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to work at it, and it won’t come without its own set of worries and doubts but no matter what gets thrown at us the world will keep turning for the foreseeable future. The changes might be small and may take time, but we must keep going, we must cling onto hope.