The longest day of the year

Every year I conclude that this day is under-appreciated. In terms of celebratory oomph, it definitely trumps New Year’s. There, we’re talking about paying attention to calendars artificially constructed around fictional time periods. But summer solstice is for real: it’s all about the sun’s position and minutes first being added to the day, then being taken away. For a person like me who loves long hours of daylight, summer solstice should be heralded in ways that make all other celebrations look feeble.

I seem to remember something from my youth about setting wreaths, with candles in the middle, to sail on rivers, as the night finally closed in on daylight. Or is that in my imagination? How do you place candles in a wreath’s center? Isn’t that where the hole is?

Google-to-the-rescue revealed so many sites on summer solstice – it would take the rest of my longest-day-of-the-year to go through them. But the very first one that had celebratory notes attached to it (from a website here for “pagans and those practicing nature spirituality” ) did offer some promising ideas for today. I read the following:

Celebrate Solstice time with other Pagans -- take part in the Pagan Spirit Gathering or some other Pagan festival happening during June. Keep a Sacred Fire burning throughout the gathering. Stay up all night on Solstice Eve and welcome the rising Sun at dawn. Make a pledge to Mother Earth of something that you will do to improve the environment and then begin carrying it out. Have a magical gift exchange with friends. Burn your Yule wreath in a Summer Solstice bonfire. Exchange songs, chants, and stories with others in person or through the mail. Do ecstatic dancing to drums around a blazing bonfire.

I’m not sure that writing a blog post on solstice with a vague recollection of possibly imagined floating wreaths qualifies as “exchanging stories with other persons through the mail,” so I should consider some of the other options. Welcoming the rising sun is out the door – too late, of course. True, I could well imagine myself doing a crazed dance around a bonfire, given the right amount of spirit (of the digestible kind). Absent that, I’ll just make a pledge to continue my support of the earth by writing periodic checks to Green Earth, my organic lawn care service. Such an act seems to me to be a bit anticlimactic, perhaps not what I would count as sufficiently thrilling, but if that’s what the Pagan worshipers out there want me to do, so be it.