With the coming of the Summer Solstice being now some weeks away, I thought back to how this present Spring season began for me. One morning, I awoke with the sun in my eye. But the sun was just a globe, not glaringly spread out in its usual blinding, amorphous blob of light. I say “amorphous” and “blob,” because, although we know the sun to be globe-shaped, any attempt to visually appreciate its “globe” shape without proper eye shielding leads to pain and blindness!

The distance of 93 million miles seems to be what’s exactly needed to make the sun’s globe appear to be the size of a human eye!

So, there I was, my head resting upon my pillow, and the rising sun, briefly “resting” upon the eastern horizon.

I was eyeball to “eyeball” with the sun, one “eyeball” being reddish-gold, the other, hazel. I suddenly thought of the name “The red-eye special,” which refers to a late-night-departing, early-morning-arriving flight, in which a person’s eyes are red from not having enough sleep. A vice-versa variation of that might be the arriving airline passengers comparing the rising sun, itself to a red eyeball which hasn’t had enough “night’s sleep”(don’t worry. I’m fully aware of the actual science).

The absence of the dawning sun’s glare was, of course due to the light-filtering effect of morning clouds, rendering its disc as painlessly visible as when viewed through a welder’s glass as an aid to view sunspots! Due to the natural magnifying effect of the horizon’s stretched-out air, it looked as if there were no spots to see! It’s the same atmospheric magnification effect as with the rising full moon; but in the moon’s case, there’s no lack of visible “blemishes!”

In that almost mystic moment, the rising solar disc had briefly lain like a coin on my eyes. But unlike those departed souls ferried in death across the river Styx, this dawning “coin” placed on my eyes was a welcoming “deposit on life,” the gift of another day!

Two tall pines stood on opposite sides of the sun’s gold-red globe, neither one providing obstruction, but instead, a “centering” of the solar face between them. They seemed to exist as unnecessary marks of punctuation of the sun’s day-filling light!

With thoughts of stones, stone circles, and solstices, I suddenly realized the day was Monday, March 20th, 2023’s first Spring day!

It wasn’t necessary for me to walk up a hill or travel far away to some distant stone-circled plain to see spring “spelled out.” And neither did any of Spring’s historic granite stone markers come rumbling across thousands of miles to make their “announcement” just outside my sliding glass doors.

Instead, the main, storied subject of ancient stonework had, itself seemingly travelled a well-worn path to the vicinity of my pillowed head.