FIVE: The Tropic of Cancer

The primary holidays I celebrate in my eclectic personal religion are the two solstices and equinoxes. Those are the “real” events that others celebrate as Christmas-New Years-Chanukah-Kwanzaa-Saturnalia-Brumalia-Sankranti, Easter-Passover-Zagmuk, Midsummer, and Ramadan. I always set my watch so that the alarm goes off at precisely the time the sun makes its direct hit on either the equator in the case of the equinoxes or the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer in the case of the solstices. These are the events of course which give Earth its seasons, and while humans might have flourished without the earth’s wobble on its 23 degree tilt, that tilt has made our lives richer, more agriculturally productive, and given us a big metaphor for the cycles of life, death, rebirth, and renewal.

This past June 21 at precisely 11:06 AM PDT, I had a sonographic probe up my ass when the sun hit the Tropic of Cancer. My doctor was looking at the TV projection of the sonographic photo of my prostate and telling me that MY cancer was so small and localized in a slow-growth area of the gland that he wouldn’t recommend any treatment at this time, that I was a candidate for active surveillance, or watchful waiting. This was of course exactly what I wanted to hear, and to hear it a such a spiritually powerful moment was yet another gratifying instance of synchronicity.

Of course for every such example of powerfully meaningful coincidence, there’s another counter example, like that bus last week in the French alps, full of pilgrims who had just prayed their hearts out at Sanctuary of Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette, where the Virgin had appeared to two boys in 1846. She was nowhere to be seen when the bus flew off the cliff and plunged into the La Romanche River, killing 26 of the pilgrims. Maybe the Virgin saved the other 25 who survived.