Daily Archives: June 21, 2015

Great Wheel, Health

Summer Solstice: 2015

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                 Healing Moon

The longest day. The summer solstice. Is here.

Black Mountain Drive is a Great Wheel home. We closed on Samain, moved in on the Winter Solstice and celebrate our half year anniversary as Coloradans on the Summer Solstice.

While Beltane, the season just passed which began on May 1, begins the growing season, the Summer Solstice, with its abundant sun and gathering heat, is its zenith. Now the vegetables have taken root and begun to flourish, the corn and the wheat and the soybeans fill farmer’s fields, flowers brighten fields and gardens. Food is abundant for all living creatures.

Mother earth shows off her power to nourish and sustain. The shades of green become infinite, vibrant grasses shading to chartreuse aspens, light green iris blades shoot up next to gray green sage. The true transubstantiation on display everywhere, chlorophyll dominant in the landscape.

Spring fawns, calves, piglets, squirrels, fox kits, wolf pups all play and roll on the green. It is a season for life, for new life and old. This is the time when the Great Wheel reminds us that life, this one wild amazing life as Mary Oliver says, is a gift freely given and freely supported. Life is not always in its summer season, but when it is, rejoice!

It is in this season of life, of growth, of nourishment, of color that I will have my prostate surgery. Fitting, I think. Its purpose is to remove a multiplying threat to my life and what better season to excise it than the season of life at its most vibrant. My healing will gain from the sunshine, the flowers, the fresh foods available in this, the season of midsummer.

Colorado

Mataam Fez

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                  Healing Moon

Bernie Sanders we missed. The Mataam Fez serves 5 course meals, lots of hand washing, belly dancing and a generous amount of time between each course. Most of the food was very good, all eaten by hand, thus the handwashing, though the lamb brochette was overcooked.

The meal began with a salad and palate cleanser. The palate cleanser was shredded carrot with raisins in a slightly tart sauce. The salad had beets, spicy carrots, spinach, chopped tomatoes and onions and spiced potatoes all in individual portions. The third dish was phylo dough covered with powdered sugar and filled with a meat, couscous, spice mixture. Very tasty. The entree, mine lamb on a bed of pilaf with raisins and Kate’s shrimp in a delicate sauce, came next. After a long wait, during which the belly dancing happened, came mint tea, rose water for our hands and face, then a plate of cut fruit.

Across the way from us a toddler, a girl, got very involved with the belly dancing, swaying and twirling as the woman, older, took her out into the middle of the room to share the dance. This was a toddler friendly environment since guests sat either on pillows or hassocks at a low table.

We decided this was my father’s day meal out and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Until we had to get up from that position. But we managed.