Hello! I’m back, did you miss me?
I had a beautiful time in Malaga, city of a million swifts, beautiful tapas, flamenco, graffiti, wood-fired sardines on the beach and sunset sea swimming. It is also a place where you can get a decaf oat milk flat white (‘descafeinado con leche de avena’), which I very much appreciate. We arrived home into Spanish temperatures, and midsummer, and our own small smattering of swifts screeching up and down the street, so it hasn’t been as brutal a re-entry as these things can be.
This is our weekly community post in which we track the seasons week by week, noticing and picking out the minutiae and creating a picture of the changing months as we go. I am interested to note that I have taken hardly any pictures this week, and am going to re-use one that some of you have already seen on the chat - apologies! but It makes me realise that this practice of noticing and communicating about what we have seen really is that, a practice. As soon as I had a ‘week off’ I stopped looking in the same way, stopped engaging so well with the world around me, and stopped noticing those little things. You will forgive me, and it will be different next week. It’s a lesson in how important this community is to me in making me really look.
Without further ado:
Sunrise
Me and two friends got up at literal 3am, pulled on our swimming costumes, and drove up north of Bristol to West Country Water Park, which was open for a solstice sunrise swim. We had a dunk, a sauna and a sausage bap and watched the sun rise. It was beautiful. We even got these glorious ‘god rays’ as there was a nice spread of cloud along the horizon.
To be honest I then went home and slept for three hours and even after that I felt wiped out for the rest of the day, which is not how you want to feel on the longest day of the year during a heat wave. This is the summer solstice conundrum: one wants to be spiritual but it is so very EARLY.
That’s it from me. Please tell me: what have you been up to? What have you done/noticed/eaten/jumped into that marked this week out as THIS WEEK in the year? We are of course coming up to the end of the month so this is your last chance to be included in the poem of the month. I can’t wait to hear.
As the summer solstice sun lightened the sky at 3.42 it also lit the perfect crescent moon just above it ,that sight for me was perfection ……….not usually such an early riser,that walk around my garden in the damp grass was unforgettable!
I love that the swimming pools and water parks opened early, but yes, it's so very early.😅