by Hagar Harpak
AI illustrations by AstroCREATRIX
What do you think of when you think of Summer?
How does it feel in your body?
What is your heart’s response to the sunkissed world?
Frolicking with a lover in the fields, early in the evening when the sun isn’t yet set, its luster is soft, and a warm breeze brushes against your skin.
Rolling hills and rolling joints, smoking into the sunset and celebrating life at an outdoor concert with friends, or hiking solo in the late afternoon.
Chunks of freshly picked tomatoes, some basil, with delicious olive oil sprinkled generously over the vibrant red and green.
A day at the beach with your kids, watching them make castles in the sand, and body surf in the waves.
When I was growing up, my dad would take us to the beach in the Summers. The warmth of the Mediterranean Sea would keep us in the water for hours; my sister near the shore, playing with wet sand, and me deeper in, doing handstand after handstand, merging with the waves, emerging for air with salty hair and red eyes, and going back in again.
The anticipation of Summer made my heart swell with excitement. It still does. As the days get longer before the Summer Solstice, there’s this feeling of expansion stretching through my whole body, even now, as an adult. Warmth and radiance bring my senses a physical response, the feeling that school’s out, and weeks of free play are ahead of me.
I remember getting the blues toward the middle of August, knowing that school will start again in September, and those days of freedom are short, shortening along with the daylight.
Summer Solstice is a celebration of light. Light is a symbol of hope, of possibility, of the ability to see, and the capacity to grow. Ancient cultures (and new versions of them too), celebrate the transition into this season as a bejeweled expression of the Mother Goddess. Here, in this moment when the sun is at its highest point, and the brilliance of our star reaches its peak as it extends across the sky, some cultures saw the earth as a pregnant goddess.
This moment on the wheel of the year marks the transition of the goddess from maiden to mother. The land is ripening. Food becomes abundant. Flowers become fruit. Nectar becomes honey.
Nature adorns herself in green and gold, in blossoms and fruiting bodies of plants, in colorful expressions growing and becoming, in rich soil supporting the living creatures that move and breathe on and within it.
As the maiden becomes the mother she unfolds as the nourishing force of existence, the sustaining flow of creation, the generous power of life.
The currents of energy move outwards. It isn’t the rising of Spring, or the descending of Autumn, but rather an emanating force pouring forth from within, like a fruit swelling with delicious flavor and juice, a mandala drawn from the center toward the outskirts, a poem pulsing through pen onto paper, or an artist bringing their vision into form.
Summer Solstice is often referred to as Midsummer. Some ancient traditions divided the year into two seasons – Summer and Winter. The beginning of Summer was what we think of as the Spring Equinox, and it ended on the Autumn Equinox, which was considered the beginning of Winter.
Shakespear’s Midsummer Night’s Dream takes us on a journey into the magic of this holiday, deep into the woods, deep into the world of fairies, where love spells are cast, and tricksters play wild mischief.
Fairies have been sprinkling their sparkles over midsummer celebrations since way before Shakespeare’s time. Fairies are nature spirits. They are the hidden forces within flowers, the power of plants, the energy of the ecosystem, the pulse of a place. This sacred seasonal moment is one potent with earth’s enchantment, and with the vibrant vigor of this phase in the growing cycle. There is magic in the way that the natural world vibrates with aliveness. No wonder the human eye perceived this life filled moment as a group of magic makers orchestrating an event bursting with scents and color and textures that intoxicate the heart and soul.
We are beings living, breathing, and participating in a universe that is an art piece constantly and continuously shaping itself.
Interestingly, fairies have also been deeply rooted in the practices and rituals of Samhain; the Pagan holiday that celebrates the last harvest, the entryway into the year’s darkest days, and Witches’ New Year’s. Samhain is the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, and the origin of what we now call Halloween. It’s a holiday of decay, a celebration of death, when the veil between the worlds is thin, a descending force, a journey to the underworld, a disintegrating dance nourishing roots with rot.
Fairies are the spirits of the natural world. They are beings of a realm unseen, unknown, yet they are hidden in plain sight. They are the qualities, the properties, the elements, the vibration, the personality of plants. The color of the flower. The flavor of the fruit. The scent of the leaf. The texture of the bark.
Death transports a traveler from one realm into another as disintegration shifts an organism from its current shape into reintegration with its environment. Decay is a dissolution of form which transforms matter from one thing into another. As beings of the unseen realm, the fairies are death kins. After all, they are friends of fungi; an organism that feeds off of death.
A part of the constant and continuous process of this artistry shaping itself into being – this universe that is both the art and the artist – is entropy, dissolution, breaking down, and falling apart.
Modern culture has demonized the darkness. Thousands of years of patriarchy has turned humans not only against one another, not only against the feminine and the non-binary, but also against nature itself. We’ve extracted, used, and abused the resources that sustain us, and that we’re meant to share with all other living and growing beings, with all that exists on this beautiful planet. Demonizing the dark diminishes half of the year, half of the planet, and many of the people in this world. Vilifying the dark is an expression of a White Supremacist vision.
Death and darkness are scary, sure. Unseen, unknown, uncertain. But not all that evokes fear, not all that is in the shadows is a malevolent force.
The darkness that is conceived on the Summer Solstice eventually becomes decay, without which the soil would not be fertile. The night is a time of rest, of softness, of recalibrating our systems, without which we wouldn’t be able to function.
The days begin to shorten, slowly giving way to longer nights once the Summer Solstice passes. The celebration of the longest day of the year, the peak of light, of sun power, comes with the reminder that shadow is never separate from shine, that darkness is always intertwined with light, and that life and death together weave the fabric of reality. Nature is cyclical.
Light gives us confidence. Darkness offers calm. Light gives us energy. Darkness offers rest. Light moves us forward. Darkness offers a pause. Light is life, but life couldn’t exist without death and darkness.
The Mother Goddess, pregnant and nourishing during this season, will become the crone in the next. She will cackle and cry, she will sing a soft lullaby to the creatures of the land and the trees as they striptease to her voice and the wind. There’s wisdom that awaits in the embrace of the cyclical nature of the cosmos, and the interconnected interdependence of life and death.
Summer Solstice invites us into the joy and ecstasy of light and heat and growth. And it also whispers in our ears the gentle song of a world that spins along, taking us closer to darkness again once we pass through this peak portal, aging us, maturing our children, filling us with life, feeding us, and also ushering us closer to death.
And death? Death will break our form down, and send us to become part of the life of the land, to turn to dust, to transform from thoughts and feelings and skin and pulse and breath and bone and blood into soil.
Summer Solstice is an invitation to celebrate that we are creativity embodied, an ever changing entity, a dissolving form that continues to transform. We are making, we are breaking, we are breathing. We are a holy whole.
About the author:
Hagar Harpak is a mama of two, a kitchen witch, a storyteller, a ceremony facilitator, a yoga, meditation, and breath-work teacher, an explorer of the intersection of Mother Nature, mythology, philosophy, poetry, magic, seasons, and somatics. She’s been weaving myths into movement since 2004. Her website: https://www.mamamandala.com/
