(no subject)

[darchildre]

So, tomorrow is the summer solstice (for us northerly folk). I always have trouble with the summer solstice - I tend to forget about it until it's too late and when I don't, I don't really have a handle on why I'm celebrating. (That's also why I don't tend to do a lot for Walpurgisnacht or Disting.) I mean, I know what other people talk about celebrating: there's growth and Sunna in her splendor and long days and brightness. And those are all good things.

But they are also, to be quite honest, things that make me tired. Summer is good and necessary and beautiful and I just want it over, I want it to be done. I thought this morning about the fact that Midsummer means that the days start getting shorter and something inside me shouted "Yes!" At Midsummer, I find myself hungry for Yule, for the stillness and quiet and dark.

It feels...weirdly ungrateful, feeling like that. Like summer is a gift that I've been given and I'm not appreciating it properly. It's uncomfortable. But I also feel uncomfortable forgetting the solstice, not marking it because I don't grok it or don't have something I want to celebrate.

So this year, I'm toying with the idea of trying to celebrate as a sort of reverse-Yule, and trying to work through my thoughts on that by rambling in type. On the morning of the shortest day, I make sure to greet the sun as she rises. Maybe, on the longest day, I should honor her setting and the coming of night. That makes sense to me, sort of, in a balancing kind of way. We walk around the wheel of the year, from ice to fire to ice again, and at these two poles, it makes sense to look across and think of where we're headed. That actually clarifies my thinking, really. I always tend to think, at Yule, that we've reached a summit, we've done the hard part, and everything left is a slow slide into summer. It shouldn't be a surprise that Midsummer is the same thing, that the summit has moved across the wheel, that while we were sliding downhill we were also climbing up. It is surprising somehow, though, and also it's that same sort of relief. I've climbed it. I'm here. Now I can be still.

That's sort of...entirely divorced from the sort of temperate-climate-agricultural-cycle that Northern European pagan holidays tend to be wedded to but I'm kinda okay with that. I'm not a farmer and although I honor the cycles of the earth, my wellbeing is not as immediately tied to them as my ancestors' was. My heathenry has to be part of my life, not a reflection of some idealized picture of how my ancestors might have lived. They may have given thanks for the bounty of the earth at Midsummer but I'll wait on that till Lammas, when I start to feel it. This Midsummer, I'm going to thank the gods for the promise that autumn will come.

Comments

[silveradept]

One could be grateful that the swing of the heat has not yet rendered the place where we live uninhabitable, as the summer is always the kind of time where one expends all the energy to avoid being roasted...instead of frozen. I dunno, maybe it's having grown p in the cold plaves, but they always seem easier to deal with than the hot.