Solstice. Midsummer Night. The day of longest light.  A time worth noting, at least, if not celebrating.  Not in the sense of appeasing the gods/spirits who have agreed to bring back the warmth and light of summer, but a general thanksgiving for the goodness of life. In our hemisphere, in our little corner of the world, that time is today, June 21^st, and I will be celebrating with my drumming circle, most likely outside, and most likely a party with kids and adults.  There will be music, and food, and a pause to consider the meaning of the day, to us, and to other generations.

Funny, how when I was a kid, I thought the longest days were hot July and airless August – more like the peak of vacation, as opposed to the length of daylight.  Those days seemed so endless, perhaps because the nights were warm and we were free to stay out late.  I didn’t realize then, that after Solstice, the days begin to shorten in anticipation of autumn and the colder months.  It saddened me, initially, to think how the beginning of the end was built in so close to the start of our actual summer season. And yet, on the other end, it became a consolation how the days would begin to length again, minute by minute, after the Winter Solstice in December. 

 The reality of Solstice probably struck me most clearly on a cruise to Alaska, quite some years ago, which happened toward the end of June, just at or after the Solstice. In any case, the days were light until 10 pm and then became a lingering twilight.  The boys were 6 and 9, with sort of bedtimes, but that became irrelevant/moot when the action, the eating and the light were so constant around the clock.  That idea, Land of the Midnight Sun, took on significance, and I could appreciate how it would impact the way that dwellers of the northern regions would look at the world.

 So many cultures have their ways of celebrating the sun and the sunlight, its life-giving warmth, its pattern of coming and going, determining the measurement of days and seasons.  It has been so important to great numbers of people to be able to trace the coming and going of the sun – the Druids, the Mayan calendar makers, the arrangers of rocks formations here in New England – sacred spots, now all but indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape, where early native residents predicted and observed the high and low points of the sun.  And even Shakespeare, in his Midsummer Night’s Dream, acknowledged the magical, intoxicating effects of light and heat on the romantic and sexual behaviors of citizens great and small.

 Today, at drum circle, we will gather under the trees.  We will smudge as we always do, and offer tobacco to the drum. Then we will begin drumming and singing, using a large, communal family drum, and drumsticks and rattles we have made ourselves from branches, leather, sinew and beads.  We will take time to think of our fellow creatures, of the planet that we live on, and our place in it, honoring birds, mosquitoes and creator alike.  And then we will eat and drink, also gifts of the earth, and will look to the sky, thinking of the sun.