Love story

Sol Desire rose

We stand at the summit of the hill above a singing valley, in the season of roses.

The mighty midsummer sun glows like a fiery rose overhead. He is at the peak of his powers: God of Roses and lovers.

How roses shine in early June like the sun in splendour. Unmarred by living, neither spot nor blemish upon them, carrying echoes from the dawn of the world when all the earth was a garden … when loveliness could not help but beget even more loveliness.

The rose, I feel, is a tender creature, with a many-chambered heart. Sun is her food, rain her lifeblood, bee her beloved. To them she sings her songs of desire. She bears a labyrinth of soft petals we can trace to her golden heart — a burst of anthers forming her own spangled sun.

Prairie Rose (Rosa arkansana)

A devotee, you bow down amid a sea of wild prairie roses, lured by their circling fragrance. And what if you touch your lips to their petals? It signifies only that you are properly reverent, rather than hopelessly foolish.

Prairie Rose (Rosa arkansana)

For the rose is the sun.

The rose is a heart.

The rose is life force; the beloved made manifest, from petal to thorn.

The love story of sun and rose is one of a million, million love stories told between earth and sky. How many of these do we know? How many can we weave ourselves back into? How may these stories orient us in a time of loss, how might we reimagine them to rekindle our relationship with the world?¹

Perhaps we begin with those stories already close to our own hearts, and tell them to one another with all the love we have in us.

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Everywhere I look these days I see a metaphor for life and death. Is this what it means to grow old? Every flower a swan song, every birdsong an elegy, every season a parable?

But these seem to be autumn thoughts, waning moon thoughts of the kind to which I am all too prone.

Now, right now, the moon waxes to full, and June flings life force outward like the arms of a spiral galaxy, the solstice a breathing stillpoint at the center.

May we breathe here, a moment?

Chattering streams of calls run off the backs of chimney swifts as they scimitar over the gaps between houses.² Mating dragonflies take honeymoon flights. Fantastical Northern Catalpa trees wear raiment worthy of Middle Earth. Jeweled skimmers and darners perch and sparkle. An enormous black-and-gold queen bumble bee devotes weeks to provisioning her nest; now her diligent daughters gather nectar and pollen in her stead.

The sun, it warms the wild strawberries until the air is heavy with their sweetness.

This is how it is.

This is also how it is: The clouds gather. Rain scatters the rose petals. My soul goes into hiding. Six cygnets swam beside their mother — now just one remains.

No joy is unshadowed in life, even on the longest day. Every love story has its grief.

But maybe, in June, it is permissible to stop spending every second looking for the cracks, the disappointments, the sorrows?

For an hour, a handful of days, we could perhaps walk alongside Aengus Óg, the ever-young god of love, in a place where death cannot reach.

We may release our darkest thoughts to burn up in the fire of the sun.

We may allow ourselves for one hour or day or season to feel the tidal current of love and joy coursing through this life, without guilt, without needing permission, without pushing away this gift as if it isn’t meant for us, as if it isn’t made for us.

For the truth of it is: we were born for an epic love story like this. We were born for a love story like June.

May you be ever blessed,

Carmine

1. Watch a beautiful short film telling of one way we might rekindle these love stories: The Nightingale’s Song by Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, from the Shifting Landscape Film Series, Emergence Magazine.

2. They say swifts can funnel into a chimney like a widdershins smoke, a vanishing trick I have never seen for myself but can so easily imagine that I wonder whether I have dreamed it some midsummer’s night….