Summer Solstice: A Ritual to Celebrate the Light

The summer swell is here. The days have reached out at either end, with open arms, to embrace the light. By morning, the dawn chorus rises from the land, like bubbling cheer; pops of music to open the day. To close it, the late twilight stirs with the warbling of enlivened bird chatter, marking a full circle of a full day.This year, along the West Cork hedgerows, blossom bursts from even the tightest of places.The purple foxgloves are ascending to the open skies as applause does, in rapture and in thanks. Their rising salutations, these bright flashes of bloom, are visitors to what only a few months ago was blanketed in heavy, uncharacteristic snow. Now instead the sweet scent of honeysuckle join the parade and the wispy white bog cotton raises it’s flag in surrender to the summer light. Everywhere the land is encoded with elixirs. This is life seeking life. Under every stone, a tussle of insects busy. In the bushes, the hum of the bumble bee, carrying the golden pollen; magic dust to carry on the life. The swallows have returned too, their black tips and white bellies tumbling through the fields in great bursts of speed and jubilant flight. Wrapped around every tree, every blade of growing grass, every blooming branch, every song that is carried in the air, there is a single word: fullness. We have reached another tuning of the celtic year. Here in the Northern Hemisphere the summer solstice is upon us; the mid-summer marker in the great turning of the earth into this fullness. The summer solstice is one of the eight points in this great cycle of time and earth spin when we are reminded that we too are encoded into a greater span of time, and a deeper web of life seeking life. The solstice offers a reminder to us to look around, celebrate where we have come from, and prepare for where we are heading. In that sense it is both a summit and a return. Having reached peak light, we will begin the slow return to the dark, the flip-side of fecundity, the yin to meet the yang. In the summer solstice, the winter solstice is born, and here, our light and our shadow are reunited in this mid-summer yielding to the earth’s natural spin. We inhale to exhale. We rise to fullness, to return to emptiness, in order to rise again. To honour the ancient rhythms, is to acknowledge our own connection to the flow of life and creation into which we offer our gifts. In the celtic calendar, the solstice was not marked with a particular kind of ritual, but it is marked in stone. Summer solstice alignments can be seen in Bonane, in Co. Kerry, and in Co. Louth among the Knowth range of standing stones and sites. However, on St. John’s Eve, June 23rd into 24th, across the West Coast of Ireland, and in particular in Connemara, there is the tradition of the lighting of bonfires to commemorate St John the Baptist. This could be seen as an extension of the Bealtaine fires tradition, or the incorporation of a more ancient mid-summer fire lighting tradition; to gather and commune with the light.To commune with our light. To gather around it. To celebrate fullness. These are the threads of ritual which the summer solstice now offers to us to weave into our own ways. We can take it as an invitation to pause in the fullness of the summer days, rest in the knowing that the bees and the plants, the trees and the wildness are preparing the way for harvest. We are invited also to use the solstice as a gesture to honour the way we have travelled across the span of the year, a moment to take stock, and a pause from which to align to our own intentions for our own becoming.This is the power of ritual: the pause, the marking of distinct movements of time, so that we too can feel encoded into the very life that surrounds us; our gifts an intricate element of this fabric of time, our offerings- whether through our work, our families or our wider communities, a chance to contribute to the continuation of the life which supports us all. This is our call to protect those bees and those birds, those foxgloves and that bog cotton, so generations down the line they will still be giving thanks to this great summer flourishing, and this great span of unfolding fullness.Our lives, all our lives, are woven. Our rituals help to keep them so. ...Tonight, after I teach a  yoga class (with lots of sun salutations!), I’ll head down to the beach, with some friends, some poems and my journal to take stock, to pause, to honour the gifts of life which have arrived this year and commune with the light. I’ve created this short ritual for you too: a series of three reflective practices for you this solstice.‘Taking Stock’, ‘Honouring the Fullness’, and ‘Cultivating Joy’

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Thank you all.May you the light in your heart lead your way onwards, always,Clare. xx