We hear one of Mark Sparrow’s special seasonal messages, bringing the summer solstice to life for us from Haddon Copse Farm in Dorset. He includes this poem - The Sun, by Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen

anything

in your life

more wonderful

than the way the sun,

every evening,

relaxed and easy,

floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,

or the rumpled sea,

and is gone--

and how it slides again

out of the blackness,

every morning,

on the other side of the world,

like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,

say, on a morning in early summer,

at its perfect imperial distance--

and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love--

do you think there is anywhere, in any language,

a word billowing enough

for the pleasure

that fills you,

as the sun

reaches out,

as it warms you

as you stand there,

empty-handed--

or have you too

turned from this world--

or have you too

gone crazy

for power,

for things?

A summer solstice special, E09 explores how we mark and value the passing of time. Following Father’s Day, Tiger Lily chats with her father, Nick Manasseh, a musician, producer and DJ, about creativity, parenthood and changing seasons.

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Inspired by Father’s Day a couple of weeks back, I asked my father to join me for a chat on this episode. He is Nick Manasseh - a musician, producer and DJ, whose song, ‘Yes Mic’ is the soundtrack for this podcast, which is on the Manasseh Meets Praise LP, on Roots Garden Records. Nick hosts the Soul Revivers radio show on Worldwide FM every 3rd Saturday of the month (follow the link to stream previous episodes).

I find it’s often the extremes of life that hold me captive, whether physically or emotionally, in joy, in sorrow, in fear, or in a whirlwind of all these feelings and some. Many of my most treasured and troubling memories are characterised by these extremes, which can make things so memorable.

Sometimes the balance cannot be kept, the scales tip, and things can feel a little out of control. But the reality is that they never really were in control. It is only our ability to control our response to the chaos that can come and go. And sometimes the only thing to do is accept the chaos. And trust that the calm will follow the storm, even if only momentarily - when the ground smells like warm rain and the pressure in the air has lifted.

Breathe it in. Breathe it out.

Whilst much of the world seems to be running to catch up with itself, racing towards a line in the sand across which things can go back to how they were, before life as we knew it was swept away by the tides of a global pandemic. And in some ways, I hope they can. But I also hope we can remember that there was and is time to pause. To slow down and just be. The world as it was, the pace at which we travelled through it, is not one we may all want or be able to go back to. It might be different. It might have changed. You might have changed. And that’s ok.

Rather than ‘going back’ to normal, let’s keep moving forward. Because even though change and the extremes that bring it can be sudden, things change slowly as well as fast, if only we can slow down enough often enough to notice, and to watch the garden grow.

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