Summer Solstice Greetings from Orkney

Slow tv at it’s finest. Sunrise at the ring of Brodgar on the Solstice two years ago. 

Swans at Brodgar

Circles everywhere.

Everything that sets out must complete a journey.

What appears to us voyagers a tangle, random blunderings,

Is seen, angel-vantaged, as certain as the star wheel

or the journey from a root that ends in the June rose.

The seed, the bequest, will quicken again under snow.


Circles compel us everywhere,

Sun and stone and bird-flight.


Ancient wisdom knew the law of circles,

Instructing the quarrymen and masons of Brodgar

In the purity and inevitability of stone-setting.


And the great white birds

Caught in a random circle of repose

Will rise again to the blood’s curve and thrust.

— George Mackay Brown