Once again I am reminded that life is about change and adapting to
change. For the past decade I have been celebrating nature cycles marked
by sun positions in the sky: namely solstices and equinoxes. My
celebration is quite simple: wherever I am in the world
I go outside with my camera and take photographs of the sun rising and
setting, to record these special marking of the sun in the sky. So far
my sun recordings have always been in the northern hemisphere and I was
referring to December 21 as the winter solstice day and June 21 was the
summer solstice. Now that I am in the southern hemisphere I am learning
to call June 21 the northern solstice, and December 21 the southern
solstice. Everything is relative and now June 21 has become the shortest
day of the day announced by the northward equinox, which once for me
was the spring equinox.
This morning I woke up with the sense of
depression which has become almost constant in the past two months —a
cocktail of stress, anxiety, sadness, nostalgia and regret; but I
decided to greet this important day of the year, even if for me was
announcing the second winter in six month. I was rewarded, as the sense
of heaviness lifted while I was witnessing the sun rising from across
the Corio Bay. It was not really a spectacular sunrise, yet it brought a
sense of calm and feeling of connection with this foreign land.
Walking back to my accommodation, I looked at low sun light from a
different viewpoint, which offered one of the sought after sunrise
compositions. I had an epiphany that sometimes the same object of
observation is more interesting and can become beautiful is seen from a
different perspective point. Perhaps I should apply it to my troubled
academic journey and embrace this change, although quite different from
expectations.