Member-only story
Marking A Solstice In Greece
A pause to mark the midpoint in a constantly moving life
The sliver of a bright crescent moon beckons. I step into the balcony to give it my full attention. I see a twinkling star above the moon’s gentle curve; like a perfect couple, they smile and light up the entire sky.
It is still dark when I walk to the beach. The mauve of the horizon changes from a band of magenta to pink, orange, yellow, red. A wide rainbow zig zags on the horizon moving rapidly, as if a carefree child is waving a color palette across the canvas of the wide sky.
An owl hoots, reminding me to hurry. Bird calls gets louder, a symphony of sounds urge me on. Street lights illuminating the path now seem unnecessary as the first light of day generously washes over everything in sight.
The water, surprisingly, is not cold. I pick up my flip flops and walk with wet feet caked with sand to a dry spot. The camera captures but does not do justice to the beauty of the morning sky on the island of Crete; the moon, a faint apostrophe on a pale blue sheet; the star, no longer visible.
A bright spot on the distant horizon, a gleam under the surface of the ocean keeps getting larger, like a balloon being inflated from beneath, forced upwards by sheer pressure.
