Solstice

The Midsummer's Night, the Solstice, will be here on the 21st of June at 05:45 this year. It is tempting to think it would be the same every year but that's not quite right. On one hand we have the loose idea of the longest day of the year, usually attributed to the 21st. Then there is a looser definition, celebrated from midday on the day before to the noon of the following day.

Here is the Wiki view... "The name is derived from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), because at the solstices, the Sun stands still in declination; that is, the apparent movement of the Sun's path north or south comes to a stop before reversing direction." - a wonderful description. It seems almost impossible take in the magnitude of an interaction between a 5.9736 × 1024 kg mass flying through space at 29.8 kilometers per second and a 4.57 billion year old yellow dwarf star - but that is what we are talking about. A relationship betwixt the Sun and the Earth.

For some this describes an astronomical event, and therefore a colder description than would seem applicable to a long, lazy Summer day and cool evening dusk that goes on forever. Here we have an ideal concept of the Solstice as an immeasurable 'a priori' concept, where we know that the days get longer and longer up to a point, thereafter getting smaller and smaller. Astronomy fails, it seems, because we can never measure this interaction to ever really 'know' it. Yet within that knowledge we understand that there is a perfect point at which the year reaches its furthest point towards the Sun and begins its turn back towards Winter once more.

This perfect point has occurred every year in history, for as long as the Earth has orbited the Sun, which transforms it into a conceptual point of time, an event outside of time and yet connected directly to all the Solstices our ancestor have ever enjoyed. This perfect point in time occurs at the Solstices and the Equinoxes, the square corners of the circle of the year. Here I find a bridge between the two concepts of time and season; the perfect concept and the physical reality of the years passing. For this reason I celebrate in the Solstice, the movement of the universe and the perfection of the cosmos. For me there is nothing cold about the astronomic realities of a solar transitory marker, it reaffirms the wonder of life.

This celebration, for me, ties in with a vast array of pagan/heathen/animism/zen religious practice. Where the focus of celebration and mysticism lies in honouring the relationship one has with ones environment. I should also redirect the readers attention to Platonic reality and Universals, where our conceptualisation of a Solstice and the meaning imbued is outside of the Solstice itself, yet links every Solstice.

My celebration will be in time with my friends and family, inward reflection and a really nice slap up feast; which should not, in all fairness, be confused with the interpretations of neo-pagans, wiccans or quasi-Christian 'baptist' revels. The Midsummer also has it's own special resonance. It is faerie time with the ever lasting twilight, when the faerie revels were to move their homes( Secret Commonwealth by Rev. Kirk, 1691). It is the point, beyond which contraction occurs and the move to the next festival occurs.

First, we eat - next stop Lammas!