The sun stands at the height of the sky, stands at the apex of the bowl of heaven forged by the Great Smith at the beginning of time - hammered out by the Great Smith when the world was born, when the hills rose and the land knitted itself together out of chaos and the seas filled with the blood of creation.
It rises to the crown of the skull of the primordial giant, rises to the hollow brow of the old one. Across times, across ages, the world stands still as the sun rises on this longest day.
3/ In a stone circle, those gathered from scattered settlements fall silent, one by one, as the eastern sky slowly pales, and the clouds blush, and the first rays slice above the dark hills. As human sounds fade to silence, the birds find their voices, and a multifarious fluting sings the bright orb up over the horizon, crowning the heel stone.
4/ Far away, an old person gathers herbs at dawn this sacred morning, the seventy-seven lucky herbs to make medicines for all diseases, even for the nameless disease.
Their steps are slow and reverent as they wander alone where the forest meets the meadow, each movement of foot and hand and sickle a prayer as the first rays of the winking sun turn the morning mist to a luminous, billowing blanket, and the sun reaches up over the trees, and the sleeping world is suddenly flooded in light.
Carried in its golden chariot, drawn by golden horses, it wheels its way across the great plain of the firmament as the day turns - languidly, exultantly - toward evening.
And so the longest day stretches out across the hemisphere, lazily, as if it could have no end, until at last it wanes down gently, so slowly, toward this shortest, sweetest night.
7/ And outside each village, just beyond the boundary between the known and the unknown, bonfires rise up lustily, crackling, hissing, and across the lands young lovers turn to one another in the blue dusk and the ruddy firelight, and old folks reach out their hands to the warmth, and children, up past bedtime, run shrieking like wild animals, and music pours out from under the dark trees -
8/ - and everything - everything - glows, pulses, burns, filled to bursting with sun and scent, ripe with sweetness like a summer fruit, warm, warm with the heat of the sun, the blazing, glorious, unconquerable sun.
And so do we, each one of us, burn and glow and rise and set, and light our own fires, and join with our loved ones, and make our own ways across the spans of our lives, and blaze as brightly as we can before we too go down into night.