Ways To Be Well- Volume 24- Summer Solstice
A simple package to celebrate the Summer Solstice; a poem, a yoga practice and some journalling questions- all to take to a field, a patch of grass or a sunbeam.
Summer Solstice
will be significant
im going to release something
soft and radiant
and true
into the world
by Jenny Zhang 
Midsummer is a threshold, one of many that are dotted like pin prick stars around the circle of the year. They are easy enough to miss, I suppose, if we just consider them days like any other, but we are lesser for lack of significance. And I like the quiet call of these more earthly celebrations, tethered as they are to the year’s constant and reliable turning.
Humans have long celebrated thresholds. We mark births and deaths, and the anniversaries of each. We celebrate unions between lovers, and then they count the years down, offering each other presents of ceramic, and metals and -if it turns out well- even gold. The year is dotted too with religious ceremony, significant to those who practice and celebrated even still by those who don’t. It is hard not to jump on a bandwagon when it is offering up a day of revellery or rest. And every culture has added to it all, with more days that have their own significance, moments in history that are deemed worthy of note, days that can equally be ones of celebration or lament.
But often they require editorial from outside; reminders from people who usually want to make money out of occasion, so they suggest we buy the right cards, colour coordinate our decorations, give each other mainly unwanted gifts. Which is why I have always preferred the thresholds that the year throws up of its own accord, ones that are so often felt as a visceral experience in the body. I know that midsummer is coming because I work, like most of us, out of a diary. But I swear I can feel it coming too, have noticed the quiet building over the weeks - like an endless inhale, a little more, and more still- as the weeks have merged seamlessly from spring into summer. Weeks that my garden has spelled out in its floral alphabet, letters now in the shape of lavendar and rose and honeysuckle, whose story is one of abundance and peaking.
Dictated by forces beyond human control and matched by landscapes that are mapped by them, these are dates set by the more eternal and reliable rhythms of sun and moon and tide, and their bidding is both from somewhere and to somewhere that feels deeper than only recent history. Deeper still than bone. Earth deep.
Whilst midsummer has long and is widely celebrated with rightful revellery- it feels like a time for gathering and merriment and feasting- it can just as easily be acknowledged in smaller but no less significant ways.
This year I will be gathering with a host of old friends to celebrate one of the best of them, but in other years I have more simply walked before dawn, bleary eyed and as a trio of girlfriends, meandering our way with flasks of hot tea and banana bread to sit atop a hill and watch the light bleed into the sky, or gathered to swim amogst water lilies and eat breakfast on a table decorated with ivy. And another midsummer still I spent the evening deliberately solo, sitting from dusk till late darkness, just reading in the garden and watching the swallows, with no purpose in mind other than to mark, unremarkably, a moment in time. That we acknowledge the passage of time, the culmination and the turning that is summer solstice, matters more - I think- than how.
Mark it and perhaps take quiet stock, which is the real invitation of these moments. To sit in momentary and rare presence and then look both back and forward; an anchoring that both lays to rest and looks for hope.
So as well as a yoga practice dedicated to the summer solsice for you to have and do- perhaps on midsummer itself- I am offering up some questions that you might want to take out into one of the coming twilights, a dawn or a dusk and contempalte the answers to. They can be a lovely place to journal from, but can equally from the foundation of a meditation, which i have also made them into for you.
Happy Summer Solstice to you all. We are lucky to be here.
x Nicole
A Yoga Practice for Midsummer