Early in June, just past dawn, this young red-tailed hawk perched on the fence outside my writing room door for a good long while.

May is come! I do love the word May, which can be a lovely woman’s name, a gracious way to say please, a branch of flowering hawthorne, the fifth month of our calendar year, or best of all, Beltane.

There were merely too many clouds for this eclipse to register as the transcendent experience of a lifetime. For those of us taught as children to look to the heavens for the source of our being, granted by an old man with a long beard and a bad temper, a solar eclipse carries with it the weight of antiquity and mystery.