Summer evenings on our Humptulips County farm are my favorite time of year. Since I live sufficiently far from work and its attendant stress, by the time I arrive home each Summer evening I feel as if I am on vacation at a remote mountain cabin or some other out-of-the-way place. The work/home switch in my mind has flipped during my drive home, and, except in extraordinary circumstances, work no longer intrudes.
My greatest pleasure on Summer evenings is sitting on our front porch watching evening’s shadows lengthen, stretch, commingle and eventually knit themselves into night. Twilight is the sweetest part of this process, for it’s then that the first mysteries of the night begin to make themselves felt and heard: the light is sufficient for sight, yet dim enough to fool the eyes and make each odd movement equally a matter of vision and of imagination.
Summer evenings are a restful process which is promotive of the contemplation of larger issues than those we face on an every day basis. Sounds are muted, vision is reduced, and the smells of a warm day cooling into night are paramount. It is at such times that thoughts of the infinite seem appropriate and non-threatening. As the sky rolls away and the heavens open, I can easily transport my thoughts to the nearest star or puzzle over the eternal riddle of our existence.
Yet on Summer nights, I often wonder about gods. There is something in the ancient traditions of multiple gods that appeals to me, and I often wonder whether those of us of monotheistic faith have lost something important. In so saying, I am not lamenting the loss of the larger, dramatic gods of antiquity, such as those that lived on Mt. Olympus or in the fjords of Scandinavia and celebrated war, love, jealousy and other basic human emotions. To the contrary, it is the smaller gods I miss – the creeping god of the forested land behind our house, the rustling god of our pastures where the field mice hold sway at night, the bubbling, laughing god of the distant creek, and the flying god at roost somewhere among the pines that line our driveway. I can almost conjure these small gods into full existence on quiet Summer evenings, but my beliefs are so entrapped by modern thought that these gods no longer voluntarily make themselves visible to me. Instead, I must rest content with mere rumors and hints of their possibility.
On such Summer nights, I wonder what it is that mankind has lost to the trappings of civilization. Since I never lived in a time when a belief in magic was considered rational, I cannot be completely certain about what we who live in these times are missing, but I am convinced that it is something of immense size and importance. On Summer nights I can hear the remnants of whatever-god-it-might-have-been rustling in the hidden places of our farm, in the underbrush and in the branches of the pines, as if it were trying to communicate its continuing existence to the larger mysteries living overhead amid the interstices of the stars – the larger mysteries that mock our ongoing failure to understand all that the darker reaches of the heavens might contain or, perhaps, mean, just as whatever-god-it-might-have-been mocks our continuing lack of appreciation for the earth that nourishes us.
And so it is that a Summer evening passes slowly and wonderfully into night. As I rise to go to my bed on such an evening, I do so with the certainty that the coming of the following morning will reveal the lengthy shadows on our grass disengaging from the night into their separate constituencies, only to shrink into the heat of Noon until they reappear, in reverse, upon the advent of tomorrow’s nightfall.
I am as certain as I can be that such a marvelous, mysterious and seemingly eternal cycle can only result from magic wielded by gods.
