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digital camera obscura of summer solstice tea ceremony, 6:07am EDT, June 21, 002018, all images this post FOP 002018

On June 21, 002018 smudge studio held a tea ceremony at Head of the Meadow beach in Truro, Massachusetts. The ceremony coincided with the moment of summer solstice at 6:07 a.m. EDT, 5:07 a.m. “sun time.” Ceremonial tea (matcha) was whisked.

With significantly less use of electric lights and devices, other rhythms surfaced for us. We took special notice of how plants, light, temperature, other creatures are deeply attuned to the day/night cycle. The effects and interconnections of their different attunements are deep, evolutionary, material realities. Yet, we realized we’ve been missing most of this. By staying up long after dark, and waking up long after daylight arrives, the lived experience of the transition into and out of night, and all that it commands, is truncated. It’s typical for most humans to wake into and go to sleep out of a world/reality filled to the brim with human-centered concerns, awarenesses, and thoughts. The sense that human existence is the biggest force/reality at play easily takes center stage.

And yet, by exposing our bodies and minds to the transition of day into night, and night into day, spin after spin, we quickly realized that this daily transformation is actually much vaster and enduring than us. Over billions of years, lifeforms that led to we humans literally evolved out of and in response to the continuously moving, angled “line” of day/night. Its rhythms and effects are deeply embedded within us and play out as “us.” Our bodies and brains, eyes, cells, blood, gut bacteria, are ruled by circadian rhythms that we must live by, or else live out the consequences of futile attempts to deny them (see Foster and Krietzman’s 2005, Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing for details on the human illnesses that result from attempts to override a human body’s biological “clock”).  – FOP

Source: Making Tea and Life at the 23.5 degree tilt of the Earth | FOP