The shortest day is behind me

"So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal." — 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

The days are getting shorter now.

It has only been five days since the solstice and you cannot tell the difference yet, not really, not in any way you could measure with your eyes. The light is still wide at eight o'clock. The fireflies are still out past nine. But I know, the way you know a thing before you can see it, that the longest day is behind me and the rest of the year is a slow giving back of what was given.

I do not mind it. I did not always not mind it. There was a time when the shortening days felt like something being taken, a little at a time, and I would have told you I liked the light and wanted more of it. That was true. It is still true. But there is something else true now that was not true then, which is that I have lived long enough to see the pattern come around enough times that I am no longer afraid it will not come around again.

Seventy-seven times the earth has gone around the sun with me on it. Seventy-seven Junes. Seventy-seven solstices, or close enough. Most of them I did not notice. You do not notice when you are young, because the years are the water you swim in and you do not think about the water. You think about the swimming.

I think about the water now. Not all the time. Not in a way that pulls me under. But I notice the days getting shorter the way I notice the garden changing, which is to say I notice it because I am paying attention and paying attention is what I do now. I paid attention to children for thirty-five years and now I pay attention to the things that the children were too busy to notice, which is the light and the season and the slow turn of a year that is doing what it has always done.

The coffee is hot. The morning is here. The days are getting shorter and I am still in them.

Lord, I am still in them.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.