Seventy degrees and sunny here in the Carmel River Valley. In the last three days we had high clouds and lower temperatures. The dog walkers were wearing their parkas and the crows sitting on the phone lines had a kind of threatening Van-Gogh-in-the-wheatfields kind of vibe. But the last two days the clouds burned off by afternoon and we sat outside enjoying the longest days of the year.

In Alaska solstice came and went with a lot of notice. On one hand it marked the longest day of they year and on the other it marked the beginning of the race towards darkness. It usually came with drum circles on the beaches and picnics which lasted well past midnight. The semi pro baseball team in Fairbanks plays a solstice game starting at midnight without turning a single light on in their little stadium. There are poetry readings and all night croquet tournaments, Chamber musicians will sit around fires and and play in quartets until the wee hours, while rock and rollers will sing themselves horse by morning.

I celebrated by trying to take notice of my surroundings and what’s going on in my interior life as well. I tried to photograph the flowers that bloom outside of our well kept gardens. In the field next to the property wild radish flash yellow in the tall grass and arsenic is scattered throughout the fields. Poppies lay down a sweet kind of overripe smell along side the trail and three days ago I saw a skunk lope across the trail in front of me. At first I wasn’t sure it was a skunk, all I saw was a squarish body and a bushy tail. But when I came to the spot where the animal disappeared the sour smell was intense and I knew I had seen a skunk. There are tons of birds to be seen from buzzards gliding the thermals in the hills, to tiny nut hatch-ish types hiding just above the mole hills in the brush. In the middle there are ravens and crows and Jays and even a paragrin or two. Two days ago a long snake was sunning itself in the middle of our street and a group of neighbors got together to haze it out of the way of traffic, explaining to a small child that it was a “good snake, that we like to have around” because it ate gophers.

On the inside I’m having vivid dreams. Yesterday I woke up dreaming that Jan and I were sailing a small sailboat in a fierce Alaskan storm. The boat had a small cabin which didn’t have the solid heft of a well made boat. In the dream I think we were riding out the storm in a vessel made of eighth inch plywood. I didn’t feel well rested when I got up.

This morning I dreamed a poem . I just remember the first few lines:

Though I am decidedly agnostic

on the existence of the divine

my car believes believes in God.

It sees every parking lot as an

opportunity for silent fellowship.

and every deserted country road

as a moment of prayer.

Dream poems never come to me fully fledged. They are mostly coded messages from my subconscious and never make much sense. This one seemed to have the divided heart of a solstice poem. I’m consistently anxious about driving in California and maybe that’s why my car needs to believe in God. I don’t know.

Solstice is about happiness in the moment while at the same time experiencing the outrider of dread: the first day of the countdown to darkness. These ambivalent feelings appear to be more pronounced in the far north where the darkness and the light are more extreme.

As you can tell I’m trying to discover what the central coast of California is trying to tell me about solstice dreams and poetry. I had forty-five years in Alaska to read the signs. I’m going to have to be a quick study with California. As William Stafford once wrote, “The darkness around us is deep,” even here in California I suppose.