Virtual Locations and Solstice

Happy Solstice (a few days late).

As I write this, the U.S. is struggling with a just plain evil policy of seperating infants, todlers, and young children from their parent when families attempt to seek assylum or immagrate (sometimes illegally) into this country.  Immagration is a complicated issue, and I'm sure any solution will be equally complicated, but federal government's crackdown and its psychological and physiological damage to over 2000 children is immoral.

For my Solstice pause, I rearranged the statuary in the back yard, placing the Sphinx to the west of of the lawn circle and the Lion to the south.  I need to find a replacement shell for the Sphinx so she can have a reservoir of water between her front paws again.  The Lion looks good in a kind of cave of laurel and vibernum, and the Sphinx is peeking over some plant I haven't indentified astride some goldenrod.    

When I have ritual in the circle, I think I'll place the labyrinth stone in the north.  The eastern flower bed currently features foxglove (thanks, Mark!) and arbor vitea (thanks again!) and other plants that Mark has managed to coax out of the ground (our clay-heavy soil is in dire need of amendment).   If I can get my act together, I would like to build some standing tables with spiked leges so I can level them after they've been set in the ground.  

And in the back of my head, as I arrange things, I wonder about boundaries and boarders, and the chainlink fence running between our house and the houses of our three neighbors.

Wednesday night, as I lay in bed, I watched a live-stream of Stonehenge.  The sky here had just darkened, but at Stonehenge the pre-dawn Summer Solstice sky was casting enough light to see people.  Our house is far enough from Stonehenge to make it awkwardly late to watch the sunrise there.  On one hand, the technology of live-streaming made it very cool to be virtually among the trilithons of Stonehenge. On the other hand, I was in bed watching something happening that for some of the folks there must have been luminous, but that luminous experience wasn't translating across the Internet.  Honestly, it looked like a bunch of (mostly British) people standing around as if they were waiting for a rave to start.  I was very much aware that I was looking at a plastic-and-glass slab rendering of a crowd of strangers holding up their plastic-and-glass slabs to capture a photo of the pre-dawn crowd milling around Stonehenge.  

We have a planetary network that reduces the world's boundaries to palm-sized panes of glass.  

I watched for about twenty minutes, but there didn't appear to be any sort of organized ritual; of course this made me feel like I was in an old Carleton College comic strip, "Tall Corn" (renamed for the purpose of this particular strip "Mystic Corn"), where two undergraduates go out to watch the Carleton Druids have a ritual ("Wait! The Blonde is taking off her mittens!"), are disapointed that it's not a nude ritual ("That's it?!"), and end up asking incredulously, "Don't you people do crazy things?"  ("Well... Jon's a vegitarian....")

A few crazy things went through my mind, but Mark was wiped out from all the pollen and had passed out even before I started the Stonehenge live-feed, so I turned out the light and went to sleep, too.