Moon Musing 5: Solstice, Heaven’s High Hill

Leaning into the Ogham Stone, Ballycrovane outside of Eyeries, Beara Peninsula, County Cork, Ireland, or placing a smooth stone from Lake Ontario, Toronto, Canada on the Irish Chailleach Bhearra (The Hag of Beara) or peering down into the unfathamobly deep ancient well in the crypt of the Chartres Cathedral, Alsace-Lorraine, France, I am profoundly moved by the breadth and depth of time, and the precision of place. Following the line of the Ecliptic as pictured in the constellation of Virgo in Northern France, feeling the tug of the Moon on the ocean rim of South Western Ireland, my imagination propells itself into the hearts and longings of those who raised the Megalithic Standing Stones so filled with the energies of the deep waters below, so resonant with the turning of our planet, so directed toward the path of the Sun.

On a more mundane level, this spring a group of us re-painted the High Park Labyrinth in Toronto (a copy of the one on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral in Northern France). Somehow the orientation of life to time and space is profoundly satisfying. As we move into Summer 2013, here are some images I’ll be carrying with you.

Solstice: Heaven’s High Hill

We are carrying three seasons as though dead

Like bundles of firewood

Wishing our burden to ash.

Found in a valley of time

What then after these deaths?

Are we the lion’s breath

Night prowlers burning into morning

Or more like the little match girl willing the dawn of summer?

Chartres Cathedral, Eure-et-Loir, Centre, France. The north façade. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We choose one, just one, from the jumbled bundle

Choose one, strike the match, erase the night

Look up, see how the fire grows, entwining

Climbing the ancient Oak.

With a single stroke the Druid

Slashes through the stone table

Beneath, not blood but waters flow

The sacrifice? Not the son of a prophet

Nor a witch, nor Job, nor ram

The sacrifice is the clay mantle of man

Thrown over the face of God.

Does the Druid claim victory

As the shaft of light pierces the sacred ring?

We resonate like standing stones in a field

In this moment we are the whooping, fallen

We are the held angels

Lending our form to the great return

The sacred Solstice victory of light

Dividing day and night with a shoemaker’s elfin thumb

Forming from deft-cut fragments

A footprint of the universe.

Today our world hangs like a late, last blossom on the tree

The governed acorns begin to form

They in their shelter of wisdom agree to grow

While through us grows the living ladder to the sky

Love on each rung, or deep-wakened loss.

The Druid sword strikes the stone table once more

She is a quarrel of weather and tree

We are mere candles

In this human-melting ring

This stone table

These standing stones

Will outlive our own ascent

Yet in this moment we hold death’s feather

We hear the mountain dwarves dancing

Imagine the ring stones rising

And in our marching hearts

We seek heaven’s high hill.

 Copyright Lutia Lausane, Just Peachy Productions 21 June 2013