Calendar and our awareness of the clicks of the seconds on a timepiece are all structures which we have built.  They are agreements we have made with the larger “other” of our communities so that trains can pass and have semblance of order – for example.  Or so that we all know when to say to someone, “Happy Birthday to you.”  So on this day of longest light…I offer some inspiring quotes intended to get you thinking… about what is  and what seems.

All the spheres revolve about the sun as their mid-point, and therefore the sun is the center of the universe.  Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543)

We take our understanding of the universe and our earthly seasons for granted.  But for Galileo – his observations were a matter of great controversy…

The doctrine of the movements of the earth and the fixity of the sun is condemned on the ground that the Scriptures speak in many places of the sun moving and the earth standing still…It is piously spoken that the Scriptures cannot lie.  But none will deny that they are frequently abstruse and their true meaning difficult to discover, and more than the bare words signify.  One taking the sense too literally might pervert the truth and conceive blasphemies, and give God feet, and hands, and eyes and human affections, such as anger, repentance, forgetfulness, ignorance, whereas these expressions are employed merely to accommodate the truth to the mental capacity of the unlearned.  Galileo Galilei ( 1564 – 1642) The Authority of Scriptur ein Philosophical Controversies – Condemned by the Inquisition)

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.  Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 – 1527)

I cannot say what loves have come and gone, / I only know that summer sang in me/ A little while, that in me sings no more.  Edna St. Vincent Millay (1923 written)

Sunglasses are the twentieth-century equivalent of fans and veils.  People use sunglasses to hide themselves.  There is a particular art to taking off sun glasses, of choosing exactly the right moment to reveal yourself.  Jane Seymour (from Guide to Romantic Living, 1986)