𖤓 A Solstice Snap Shot 𖤓

share yours in the comments below!

Yesterday morning I rose at 5:30am to go out for a run before the rest of the house rose. The sun glowed on the horizon as I passed the upstairs window. It was glorious. In the evening, I had planned to light a fire with the kids, mark the solstice in some notable way…but by 6:30pm after my early start and longest run I’d done in 15 years, I was so tired, I had run out of steam to conjure up any ceremony at all.

And then a rare moment opened up. My three children found a game with some putty they were playing together, quietly content in a way they all three rarely are at once. I took a new journal that had arrived in the post (Tolka) and a sheepskin rug and went out on our decking in the warm solstice sun. I read a few pages, and then let my eyes gently close as I drifted off.

In Chinese Medicine the height of summer is when there is no room for even one more leaf on the trees. Everything is full. Everything is complete. I had a brief sense of this delicious fullness, this content completion as I dozed in the sun, the dog asleep at my feet, my three children’s voices fading in and out on the breeze.

It was, in the end, the perfect solstice ritual.

What about you? Did you mark the day in any way? with deliberation, or, like me, accidentally!