He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change

One of the vanishingly few experiences I've had with organised religion over the course of my life happened when I was ten or eleven, attending a friend's congregation and Sunday school because I'd slept over Saturday night and my parents couldn't pick me up until the afternoon. I think their church was Baptist. I know that this happened just after spring equinox, because of what the sermon was about.

(At least I think that's what the speech bit was called. You'll have to forgive me for getting any of this wrong. Like I said, this story is about one of, like, four times I've set foot in a church in a non-sightseeing capacity my entire life.)

Anyway, in the sermon the lady talked about the changing of the seasons and weather, something something nature something something Jesus, everything's as it's meant to be. And then she said something that's stayed lodged in my brain for probably eight years now: she said that the reason we have any of this, the reason we have sunsets that change times as the year goes on and seasons that are hot and seasons that are cold and solstices and equinoxes and so on and so forth, is that God in his wisdom made the earth and set it on an angle of 23.5° and that's how it's meant to be.

I don't think I had, at eleven, any deep reaction to this, other than maybe vaguely scornful surprise at someone trying to spin a billion-year-old geographical fuckup into part of some divine plan - what are they on about? Why would God have made a world that didn't spin on a perfectly vertical axis, what kind of crappy design is that? But evidently something did resonate, because I still remember sitting with my friend on a beanbag (this was a very liberal, modern church, one that cared less about traditional formality than it did about people showing up and listening) on the hall's carpeted floor, as a spring rainstorm lashed at the windows and someone rustled around behind the podium setting up an old-fashioned light projector for the hymns that were about to happen and a woman I'd never met before told me that everything about the creation of our planet went exactly as it was meant to.

And I'm not - I'm not religious at all, much as I've tried to be over the years in various ways (I wasn't raised in religion and I haven't had any serious crises with which faith could help, and essentially I've reached the conclusion that I've ended up just too damn cynical to really believe in any higher power), but there's something about that sentiment that's just ineffably flat-out lovely to me. The idea that there is some aspect of intelligent design to our universe, to our planet, and that whatever intelligence was designing it beheld the earth and thought hang on, it's missing a little something and tipped it over a bit, just so, twenty three point five degrees exactly, and in doing so gave us daylight savings and Yuletide and month-long nights at either extreme and small talk about how cold it is for this time of year, I thought my fingers were going to freeze and drop off on the way to work this morning, bloody weird for November isn't it? and sat back, satisfied, and thought: there. Perfect.

I no longer remember what the painting was or whose hand painted it, but in the notes I took while I was travelling, of things I couldn't really take a picture of but didn't want to forget nonetheless, there's a quote I found in an art museum somewhere, in the little explanation for one of the pieces. We're a relatively young, largely untamed country, us, and as such a fair chunk of our art history is made up of depictions of wild places unseen by the European eye until that moment. (Now I think about it, the painting might have been a waterfall?) I think I'm going to close out with that quote, because it articulates how I feel about that sermon I heard eight years ago much more clearly than I ever could. Suffice it to say I'm not a believer, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I might just believe in this.

"I serve my God in studying nature," he wrote, and every brushstroke in this painting is fired by the romantic faith that nature is the canvas of God. It is a painting about being overwhelmed by nature, by God and by art, which for him were one and the same.

these hot days is the mad blood stirring

Something I've been trying to figure out over the last little while is why I have such a Thing about summertime.

Because... I really do. I'm not quite sure exactly how to explain it, but summer makes a shape, or a set of symbols, or something happen inside my head, a very specific but also somehow formless mythology of hot weather and long days and temporary freedom. I bought a graphic novel a couple years ago called "This One Summer", mostly because of the title, and now inexplicably I'm in love with that phrase and any like it. That last summer. The summer of love. Summer without end. The first summer of the rest of our lives, which is the private internal name I had for my friends' and my first summer out of high school. Summertime, summertime, summertime, and I can't figure out why I'm like this.

It's not like I've had a lot of extremely memorable summers, or any single particularly spectacular one. My summer breaks have, for most of my life, consisted of get out of school > spend most of December and all of January doing absolutely nothing > get struck down with existential panic the night before school goes back > go back to school while the weather's still boiling, because our school year calendar is designed around the holidays rather than around nature or common sense. I've had a vaguely full-time job for the last two summers (three, counting the one we're currently at the threshold of), which means that of late the December/January stage of the above has turned into more of a balance between doing as little as possible and spending eight hours at a time making coffee very fast.

Or - alright, maybe I do know why I'm like this. The summer I was sixteen (see, there's another one of those lovely phrases!) was the last one before I got a job, and six weeks or so of it between Thanksgiving-ish and New Year were spent on a family holiday on the other side of the world, the part where it's not hot in December and January. It's cold as shit, and I don't know why that had the impact it did on me, but I was weirdly despondent, especially at the prospect of spending New Year's Eve in winter. As far as I was concerned, the changeover between one year and the next was meant to be hot and restless, barely four hours either way to sunlight, a proper blurring of the edges. I didn't know how to reconcile any of that with the reality of the opposite solstice.

Our flight home the next week got in very early in the morning, and I sat in my living room and watched the sun rise at five-thirty the way it's meant to in January and felt like things were - right, again, somehow.

So does that even come close to explaining it? I missed half a season three years ago and now I've got a goddamn complex about it. No, that can't be right. I had the thing about summertime long before that holiday, even if I didn't have the same awareness of it, and besides I think it gave me a thing about winter more than anything else.

Besides, I can barely explain the summertime thing outside of a too-short list of things that have been known to bring it on: late sunsets; certain Bastille songs; the way grass scratches your legs when they're bare; fireworks; sleeping without the covers; candlesmoke, sunburnt cheekbones, a very specific sort of unearned exhaustion. Trying to be specific about what, exactly, all those things make me feel is an exercise in pointlessness. All I can say is that it makes something big and shivery and right well up inside me. I don't think I've got seasonal affective disorder as such, but I'm sure as hell affected by the season.