Celebrating the Summer Solstice

I just had a birthday and received lots of beautiful cards. My favorite said in colorful handwriting: I’m so glad to be going around the sun with you.”  And that phrase makes me smile every time I look at it. What a great sentiment. Stepping back from our crowded busy lives and seeing us as a collection of beings living on earth and traveling around the sun. Thinking more broadly like this helps me when I get wound up by reading the news. It is almost more than I can take to find that so many people in our country, intelligent nice people, don’t see what chaos is being wrought in our government. They think our president is doing fine. That makes me feel a bit crazy. How can humans see things so very, very differently? It’s like we’re living in a science fiction dream, and we’re moving toward the crisis. But then I take a deep breath, remember that after all, we’ve been here a long time. And sometimes we take wrong turns and then have to deal with the consequences. And then I look at that card and smile: we’re all going around the sun.

For some strange cosmic reason, everyone at Prairie Hill Cohousing who moved into the four townhouse homes several years ago, later found out they were born in the same year! How likely is that?! We four are called the “45ers”. As far as I know, we’re the only ones of the 50 or so of us here at Prairie Hill to be born in that year. We are celebrating our joint birthdays tonight at my family farm’s pond and cabin. It’s a beautiful space. We’ll have a potluck after people have been swimming or boating or fishing. And then after dinner we’re going to sit around the fire circle and celebrate the summer solstice. Another reminder of our place in the wider universe.

I’m always glad when we get together to celebrate one of these turning points in our year. We are right now, today, in the longest day of 2025, and within a few days, the day length will begin to lessen. I love to sit around a solstice fire at night and remember that humans have been doing this for thousands of years, recognizing the sun and the earth’s relationship, giving thanks for the bounty the sun helps the earth create.  On one of my trips to England, our group reserved Stonehenge early in the morning so we could peacefully sit on these ancient rock markers measuring the earth’s turning. It was lovely.

Doing a little research on the summer solstice, I am reminded that here in the northern hemisphere, we are today at the maximum of the earth’s tilt toward the sun. In the southern hemisphere, this occurs at the opposite time of year, on Dec. 22. We know that ancient civilizations celebrated the summer solstice as a time of light and renewal, of thanksgiving for the abundance that our sun brings us. Today many of us still celebrate the equinoxes and solstices. It helps connect us to the natural world, to the seasons, and to our own inner journeys. It is interesting that the Latin foundations for the word solstice come from the word “sun” and the word “still.” This is because at the summer solstice, when the sun is at its peak in our part of the world, it does appear to stop for a few days before the days begin to be shorter.

Now I need to begin to prepare for our upcoming party, so I’ll leave you with my solstice greeting: I too am so glad to be going around the sun with all of you! Despite the challenges and times of struggle, we have the privilege of being born on perhaps the only planet in our solar system that can support life. And it is a beautiful planet, resilient, inspiring. Let us give thanks for that fact today, and do our best to care for what we have here in this wing of the universe.