Perfect Moment Monday: Solstice*

Perfect Moment Monday is more about noticing a perfect moment than about creating one. Perfect moments can be momentous or ordinary or somewhere in between.

We gather here once a week to engage in mindfulness about something that is right with our world. Everyone is welcome to join. Details on how to participate are at the bottom of this post, complete with bloggy bling.

Please visit the links of the participants at the bottom.

Here’s a perfect moment from my week. I hope you’ll share yours, too.

Solstices and equinoxes make me mindful of the cycles of nature, the rhythms of the earth and the heavens. It is all so outrageously big, so brilliantly designed, so cosmically perfect, and *I* am a part of it!

(Reposting my thoughts from a previous solstice.)

From Latin: sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still).

The sun stands still. Today there is a brief period of suspension, like the planetary version of the top of the breath after a 6-month long inhale. And tomorrow the sun reverses into a 6-month long exhale.

Each summer and winter solstice, I think back to a class I took while I lived in Japan. I filled my weekends that year dabbling in shiatsu, cooking, Japanese language and macrobiotics.

I’ve remembered the most about the macrobiotics class. As the sensei introduced us to the way of life, he explained a few fundamentals. The one that goes with solstice, in my mind, was this:

When something reaches its zenith, it begins to become its opposite.

This, to me, is profound. We reach the peak of summer, and we then head toward winter. Once the darkest part of the night passes, day advances.

There is a constant ebb and flow. Happiness and sadness. Abundance and scarcity. Even life and death.

When something reaches its zenith, it begins to become its opposite.

*At 11:45 pm Saturday night, MDT.

Now. What Perfect Moment have you recently been aware of? Be sure to visit these moments and share the bloggy love.