Looking Up
By August, summer reaches its greatest intensity.
Tomatoes glow on the vine. Watermelons split open with sweetness. Poppies burn against golden fields. The cicadas sing beneath a blazing sky. Nature seems filled with movement.
This is the world of red.
July gathered orange warmth, vermilion red releases it.
Mark Rothko - Color Field Painting - 1968
The Ripening of Nature
Bright red is a colour of energy, ripeness, courage and transformation.
In Goethe's understanding of colour, we begin to perceive the increasing tension between light and darkness.
Vermilion is a colour in which this encounter becomes dynamic: a visible movement, almost a dialogue, between earthly
substance and radiant light.
Its hidden essence tends toward magenta, the colour that already points beyond the visible world.
Movement will become metamorphosis.
Late summer is not only the harvest of fields. It is also the harvest of experience. Everything we have lived throughout spring and summer begins quietly maturing within us. Like fruit filled with sunlight, the soul gathers invisible nourishment. Soon it will begin breathing inward again.
Mark Rothko - Color Field Painting - 1968
The Night of Falling Stars
Around 10–13 August, the Perseid meteor shower fills the night sky.
Across Europe this has long been celebrated as the Tears of Saint Lawrence, whose feast falls on 10 August.
Meteor showers carry an especially beautiful image: they remind us that the heavens are not distant.
The cosmos continually enters earthly life.
Traditional medicine even preserved this relationship in the substance known as Ferrum Meteoricum (meteoric iron) symbolising the meeting of cosmic and earthly forces. Watching shooting stars is the essence of astronomy, the ultimate knowledge: an exercise in wonder.
A quiet conversation between the human soul and the universe.
Mark Rothko - Color Field Painting - 1968
Looking Up
August invites us to spend more evenings outdoors. To recognise constellations. To notice the slow movement of the Milky Way. To rediscover the ancient zodiac, whose images accompanied humanity long before clocks divided time into hours.
For centuries people looked upward not only to navigate the world, but to cultivate inner orientation.
The stars became mirrors of human virtues: courage, patience, wisdom, hope.
Whether or not we know their names, simply looking upward expandes the soul.
Mark Rothko - Light Cloud, Dark Cloud - 1957 - Collection of the Modern Art Museum
The Assumption: Earth and Heaven
Mid-August also brings the Feast of the Assumption. Fields are filled with herbs. Flowers are gathered into traditional blessing bouquets. Nature itself seems to offer its final abundance before autumn slowly approaches.
Light has reached its fullness. Yet beneath its brilliance, the first whispers of returning darkness can already be sensed.
This delicate balance makes August one of the most moving, heartfelt moments of the entire year.
Mark Rothko - Blue, Orange, Red- 1961
We can embrace the essence of August by:
• Watching the Perseid meteor shower with family or friends.
• Learning one constellation each evening.
• Gathering seasonal herbs and create a traditional Assumption bouquet.
• Eating watermelon, tomatoes and ripe peaches outdoors.
• Keeping a notebook of wishes, dreams or insights inspired by the night sky.
Vermilion knows that ripening is never the end, towards the sky, turning magenta, we can glance at a threshold.
As daylight slowly begins its return toward autumn, the heavens open above us.
The stars remind us that every harvest carries new seeds, and every ending quietly prepares another beginning.
Mark Rothko - Color Field Painting - Untitled - 1955
