Solstice

I tried to spend as much time outside as I could on the solstice. Clouds blocked our view of the lunar eclipse, but there's always four hundred years from now, right? My family home is about sixteen houses from Camp Elphinstone where I spent summers blissfully either as a camper, leader in training, or councilor. In the summers that I worked there I spent about twenty-two hours a day outside, save for meal time in the long house. We slept in drafty old wood huts or tepees with a fire smoking in the center all night. During the days we roamed forests and beaches, swam, kayaked, sailed, painted, played gaga ball in the rec hall and at night after the kids were asleep we did whatever. Some of my favourite nights were spent down on the dock swirling the phosphorescence around. Camp was also, for a lot of people, the place where they first did drugs or had sex. Magical place! So I strapped Sebastian to my front and walked around there for a while. There have been a lot changes in the last year, mainly some new building, stairs, sheds, all good things. When I was in labour with Sebastian I visualized specific areas of the camp that I regard as sacred and it helped me focus. There is a strong maternal energy in some of the forests, in some of the specific trees there. Probably because it is a place of nurturing children. Big Tree, an ancient Douglas Fir that was the only survivor of a huge forest fire about fifty years ago, is where we always went to play forest games so its trunk has been touched by thousands of giddy kids. There is one specific area that I think most people overlook but which is utterly sacred to me. It's a place I visualized a lot when I was trying to heal my back and tendency to clench stress in my early twenties. No healer or doctor could get my back straightened out but over time I visited this place in my mind and dropped things I never could before into the estuary. Strange, maybe, but it worked.
So I went there for the solstice. The tide has been obscenely high here, and I hit such a high tide that day that the ocean lapped up under the overhanging network of roots at the edge of the land. The forest floor actually pounded and shuddered with the waves under my feet, it was madness... I guess there has been a lot of erosion over the years. The camp cleared out a massive overturned tree in this place a couple years ago and since then it hasn't felt quite as sheltered, but it was a great visit nonetheless.