My dry yard is feebly dominated by the standing carcass of a wild olive tree. An oleaster, I guess it would have been called. I've seen my neighbor's cat get up in it, but mostly it's a perch for birds, and those mostly doves.

Doves and olives together--symbol of hope since the time of the Flood, when the dove brought back an olive branch to the survivors of the human race in their Ark, a sign that there was dry land (with trees on it) somewhere in reach. The olive branch was a symbol of peace back then all over the Mediterranean and Near/Middle East.

And the doves, ubiquitous pigeons?

Of course I wasn't going to let the solstice pass without some sort of commemoration. Especially since the day bore me an epiphany, in a circadian-related area I'd been staring at without being able to see what I needed for far too long.

Yesterday's solstice day, epiphany and all,  was also case in point for what I wrote recently about altered mental states having their efficacy and utility. But yesterday, I was scared. 

When I lived in California and Hawaii, I spent a lot of time pruning trees, climbing trees, harvesting trees, standing back and looking at trees. I was the fruit fairy, I was Ela-treela. Ultimately, I'm not built for it--too small and undermuscled, fast track to carpal tunnel and lumbar spine disabilities--and in order to do it "professionally" almost anywhere, I'd have had to adopt tools and a style of working that wouldn't suit me, and, I think, don't really suit the trees either. 

But I'm glad that I can continue to do the work as an amateur, which truly means a lover, working with sincere intent to treat the tree in best possible way. To my last post's point about taking the time to stand back and contemplate the task without being in a rush toward the next thing, working trees taught me a lot about standing back and looking--with all my senses.

It's hitting 110 degrees today. So yesterday I finally bought shadecloth to cover my sunken beds. "Bought shadecloth" is a deceptive to-do list item, as it involved figuring out which store sells the cloth, where in said store it's located (store, of course, being a very big box), and what sort of shadecloth to get.

This means there was some inertia toward that whole project, despite the fact that I'd wanted to do it for some time. Also in inertia limbo: fixing the fence, and cutting back dead weeds in order to reach the fence, for which I had to purchase the appropriate tool, a matter of $10 but still a matter of inertia.

High heat is here. High, dry heat.

Elsewhere, gardeners favor raised beds. Here, contrariwise, we sink them. Cooler, shadier, hold moisture better. I take sacks with me into the river wash and bring home plant debris, horse poop, bat poop, as mulch that is also shade. 

What's alive so easily parches to death; what's already dead doesn't compost because it's just too dry. I love heat, but when it's so high above my body temperature, it makes me wonder if there is after all a "too hot."

It used to be called melancholy, which means having black bile. If a body fluid is black, that means to say it is stagnant--in the parlance of the previous post, the habit has become a straitjacket.  Melancholy isn't  bittersweet, slightly poetic, verklempt self-indulgence. If your liver's squirting out black bile, or your gallbladder's storing black bile, things are in bad shape.

Depression, though. The solution's suggested in the name. In fact, the name suggests that you're already solving it.

Day dwindles into night, and we notice it. Night breaks into day, and we feel the birds winding up for their chorus.

No one can be immune to the accelerating daylength shift--lengthening here, shortening south of the Equator--toward the solstice. We notice, we recognize. It's like a habit that pre-exists us. Habit, in the original sense of a garment or costume (which means "custom") that we slip into, familiar attire.

But, since we make our own weather, sometimes just the right combination of triggers will trip an old circuit, an old path you've allowed to grow over with weeds is suddenly under your feet again. 

Paths and orbits exist for lifetimes; weeds, persistent as they are, are nonetheless ephemeral.