Last year, I was talking with some friends about green living and got all excited that Summer Solstice is coming up that weekend. One of them said, "I'm not very interested in Summer Solstice. What does it have to do with living green?"
For me, it has everything with living green, because acknowledging the passing of time in Nature is part of what aligns me with the natural world.
When I first became interested in "living in harmony with Nature" (read my story of how this occurred at "The Windfall"), the very first thing I explored was the concept of natural time.
We humans live in industrial time, according to clocks and calendars. But nature lives by it's own time. Can you imagine a butterfly or a whale or a tree wearing a watch or looking at their appointment book? Our bodies, too are still in tune with the sun. Each of our bodies has a pineal gland (pr "third eye"), which governs some of our internal cycles that are in sync with the seasonal movements of the sun. The pineal gland is sensitive to light and, along with the rest of the endocrine system, acts to trigger the human body into keeping in unison with the rest of nature.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2010.