This is a rare moment...
A moment that only comes around about every twenty years. What will you do with it? Tell me something true.
This year the summer solstice coincides with a full moon, an event that happens roughly every twenty years.
Where were you twenty years ago? What were you thinking about? What was important to you, then?
Twenty years ago, on the evening of the summer solstice, I was on the hill of Tara in Ireland. It was toward the tail end of a year I had spent studying with an herbalist (okay, witch) on the Emerald Isle. It wasn’t the celebration I imagined when I agreed to participate but, that solstice night, with the torches glowing and bodhran vibrating my bones, cracked open questions I’m still trying to answer today.
Solstices were not something I’d ever celebrated publicly although I’d been marking them quietly, on my own, since high school. There was something about acknowledging an astronomical event that felt tangible in a way I’d never experienced with the religious celebrations of my childhood. After June 21st, I could observe the days begin to grow shorter, the sunset coming minutes sooner. I didn’t have to believe in a god to celebrate the shifting of the seasons. There was no moral code that went along with my ceremony, no book of rules one had to accept to step into the synchronicity of the sun’s circuit through the sky. This I could call sacred.
So as each solstice rolled around, I would light a candle, read poetry aloud, and send glass-shard thoughts toward my mother who, I was sure, was down in the kitchen casting judgement. (Most likely she was down in the kitchen balancing her check book and paying the phone bill, but, when you’re fifteen, every story needs a villain.)
Since the embarrassment of a forced Bat Mitzvah, I have been solitary in my spiritual practices. They are not something I want to discuss or come to consensus around. They are most definitely not a performance for others and I never want to be observed. But when my Irish teacher’s friend, the kindly man who had taught me the ogham (an early Irish alphabet) and how to use dowsing rods, asked me to be a part of a summer solstice ritual, I found it hard to refuse. I figured it would be a small group of us trooping around some ancient site with flashlights and solemn words. And I did love getting to spend time at the Neolithic sites when few others were around. There is a quality to the air in those places that I can only tune into in stillness and silence.
Little did I know this event was a big deal, both then and now. It’s a re-enactment of what was thought to be the old Celtic solstice rites and (literally) hundreds of people ascended the hill of Tara to attend.
As May became June and the weeks counted down, I began to panic. What did one wear to a summer solstice celebration? Did I need some special goddess get-up? Regular makeup or pixie dust? Maybe I’d go goth? Goth-fairy? Goth-fairy-goddess?
My teacher swung back and forth between treating me like a bride getting ready for her wedding (what are you wearing? have you gotten a new dress?) and a priestess preparing for a sacred rite (worry about your soul, not your hair!).
Twenty years later, this is a balance I still find myself working at.
How can we be both in and of the world—a creature with a body and a mortgage and plenty of bad hair days—while maintaining the ability to shape shift into our sacred self at a moment's notice? How can I be the person who writes books encouraging people to connect with their inner wisdom and then also be the person who promotes those books on social media?
Sacred and mundane roles have often been separated: the vestal virgins were locked away from the women selling vegetable at the marketplace; the monks chant vespers on their lonely mountainsides and don’t deign to dabble in politics. But I, like many of you, want to experience the divine—this thing I call magic or the mystic— without an intermediary. I want to step into synchronicity myself, not hear a report from someone who has found flow.
In order to do that, I have to figure out—over and over again—how to toggle back and forth between my mundane and sacred selves. They are (obviously!) the same person but focused in different directions, the mundane looking outward, the sacred attuned inward.
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