The Small Despair

(c) Heather Tracy

Every celebration contains a shadow, every shadow an ecstasy, and I always shed tears at Summer Solstice. Vita Sackville-West wrote about the “small despair” of the year’s summit, when the sun glowers in its waning glory and we measure the meagre rationing of light that highlights another year devoid of sufficient freckles, unfettered feet or fucking. It marks the passage of so little done and so much to do.

The Wheel of the Year turns with Love, and we who know of its perversities and paradoxes know too that it is as fierce and painful as a babe’s precocious tooth upon a mother’s breast.

Phoebus reveals the wrinkle, the blemish and the sparkling eye. Stagnancy is an illusion. Gnōthi seauton. How immense the arc of change. I have achieved far more than I realised.