MidSummer Light and Mystery

Here in the middle of summer, light seems to be a part of everything. Though the longest day of the year has passed, the air is still warm, the sun sets late, and the symphony of summer seems to be at its loudest. Everything explodes with energy. I prep the vegetables for dinner, and I hear firecrackers in the distance, bright sunlight streaming in the windows. 

Everything right now seems illuminated and obvious. Fourth of July fireworks, huge tomatoes, the loud vacationers on the beach, and the smoke filled backyard barbeques. Summer is totally in your face. When I think of the wildness of midsummer, I don’t think of shadows, unknown places, or mysteries. Every single thing in summer enters the house and announces itself. 

There is beauty in this. We need this boldness—these answers to questions we didn’t ask. This brilliance. And yet... 

In just about a week, around midnight, my family and I will grab some blankets from the closet and some popsicles from the freezer, and we will head outside to fetch the reclining deck chairs so we can setup our observation lounge in the middle of the lush, dark backyard. We’ll put on bug spray, and we’ll lie down in the warm, thick August air to look up into the darkness, and wait.   

In this place, there is no need for a telescope or binoculars. Our only requirements are time, quiet and patience. After about 30 minutes our eyes adjust to the dark. We hold out hope that the sky will be clear or the thunderstorm will quickly pass. We hear the frogs and insects in the background. We giggle and gasp when a sparkling line of light glides across the sky. The moment is exciting and magical. It is difficult to stop watching and retire inside, but we do. For two or three nights, this will be our ritual. 

It’s the Perseid meteor shower, so named because the meteors seem to emanate from the Perseus constellation. In reality, Earth is spinning in its wide orbit around its star, a planet moving through tiny bits of rock from the Swift-Tuttle comet, and these remains are incinerated in the upper atmosphere as they fall into the gravity well of our planet. We call this a meteor shower. A comet slowly coming undone. At this year’s shower, the moon will barely be emerging from its new moon darkness, so the sky will be particularly perfect for seeing meteors both bright and faint.  

I’ve always been a lover of the sky, its mysteries. As a child, I dreamed I would either be an astronaut or work at the grocer down the street, (but that’s a story for another time). I took astronomy class in middle school, I went to monthly planetarium shows, and when friends were watching movies about heartthrobs and heartbreak, I was in my bliss watching science fiction, rented from the video store. I dreamed of witnessing humans landing on Mars. I wondered when we would make the journey. I followed launches of probes and rovers. I wondered what they would uncover, and what new questions we would have to ask. I was—I am—happy being a space nerd.  

But what I really mean is that I find my bliss in thinking about the mysteries around us, in being in the back yard at night, in looking up. The meteor shower connects the natural mysteries I love. The wonder of the spectacle that is midsummer. When a meteor burns across the sky, I will think of paths, journeys, where we were, where we are, and where we are going. In a meteor shower, summer light takes on a new context. It’s not a tool of illumination, a beam I might wield, it is a way of connecting us to the mysteries of the heavens, and the mysteries of the future. The Perseids remind me that autumn is coming, not right away, but soon, with events I expect, and ones I can’t puzzle out.  

Summer is ending. The school bus will round the corner soon, and the summer vegetables will start to wane. What keeps a family moving forward? What keeps me moving forward? What lies ahead for me? For those I love?  

It is ok not to know, to let wonderment be as bright and powerful as the spectacle of August, to let it guide us to ask for more mystery in the presence of summer’s last great revelations and beyond. 

My husband and daughter shout Wow! as a meteor, brighter than every other star, streaks across the sky. I hear giggling. I will never know why she giggles like that. Of why that laugh makes my heart swell and break at the same time. I’ll never know. But there’s comfort in wondering about these things.