Monday night 21 June was the shortest night of the year. I doubt if many people even noticed. It was just a fraction of a second shorter than Sunday night, after all. But in my inverted and otherwise warped existence here in southern Mindanao, I notice such things. Every evening I watch the sun set in the broad panorama view from our balcony overlooking Sarangani Bay to the north. As the days of the year flow by, the sun sets at a slightly different place, progressively more to the north, until on the summer solstice, it pauses and begins its 6-month journey in the other direction. In the morning, I am usually out there in the dark, as the earth rotates producing the sunrise in the east. So I am by coincidence very in touch with the progression of the earth around the sun. Of course for years and years I lived a different life; in my job, this was unimportant to me.
I've observed that animals and birds are very much in tune with this. They don’t have time pieces, used to establish artificial points of importance in their daily lives. Birds wake and start singing when the nighttime sky begins to lighten. (Sometimes an insomniac chicken crows at 3AM, not waiting for the sun.) I watch the flocks of birds as they begin their daily migration from and to their roosting places. Sort of an avian rush hour. As a SCUBA diver, I have many times observed similar behavior of fishes at sundown and sunup. “Transition†dives as they are called are very interesting in this regard. No wonder I find such times so calming. It is simply the way things were, and should be, after all.