diary entry, June 19th ♱ June paranoia. Full-feasted on it, the worm inside the stone inside the fruit. It crawled inside me and I can’t get it out. I think my sweetness is rotting and I don’t know what to do. The solstice is upon us: I will sit at the heart of the spiral and eat too-red cherries and pray the sun takes pity on me. Don’t tell me, I too am sick of my own melodrama. It all comes back to loneliness.
Midsummer is the unreal season: enchanted and profane, overripe for ritual. God, it is hard to be pious in this heat. Soft rot quickening at the corners — sweetness mingled with sickness, the sacred with the indecent. Midsummer Night’s Dream knows this best of all.
Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before, milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.”
— Act 2.1, 171-4
I was born the day after the summer solstice, so I cannot help my pagan devotions. I know I am a fool for saying so, but I have been named a heretic enough times now to privately (perversely) enjoy the title.
Of course I honour the Sun. How could one believe that God, who spoke light and life into the world, is not one with that yellow beast in the sky? God, who is all that is and all that is not? who is the longest day and the shortest, the cataphatic of summer and the apophatic of winter?
ritual I ♱ sit half-bare in the long grass and carve into the apple (sigil of the cross on the red half, the spiral on the green otherside): tend to it, put all your wishes in it, hide it in the arms of the Mulberry tree to be eaten by the birds. Midsummer is best for divination, and love.
Everyone knows how the moon makes lunatics of us but remember that in June, madness becomes the sun’s domain. Though maybe this is just my lot, an exchange for my solstice birth.
The day slips indistinctly out from the dream: nights are mayfly short now, too short to really sleep either deeply or completely, so you are always held in the thin milky gap that heralds wakefulness. And then you rise to the dawn and your blood slows, your bones drag towards the earth, your body sunk in drowsiness. The sun anaesthetises more than anything.
Thus my thoughts are limpid and without edge, only flushed sometimes with an inexplicable fear, or worse, anger. I am unused to viciousness and I hate it. I will go to the sea soon and it will cure me, take away my violence and restore me to tenderness. I will give it offerings like I did when I was young. The sea is also God.
I always felt that the world was haunted by God [...] I experienced it; I didn’t believe it. It was deeper than belief. If someone asked me, “Do you believe in light?” I’d say, “What do you mean? I’m sitting in the light. I’m seeing by the light.
– Li-Young Lee in an interview
♱
ritual II ♱ keep iron horseshoes hung at your window, for protection, and saucers of milk and honey at your door, for placation. Midsummer draws apart the veil between us and the faerie world.
The solstice arrived a week ago. The longest day, when the sun might just be eternal, when time might just collapse into itself and we feel we might just remain like this, in limine:
Each year, on this same date, the summer solstice comes.
Consummate light: we plan for it,
the day we tell ourselves
that time is very long indeed, nearly infinite.
And in our reading and writing, preference is given
to the celebratory, the ecstatic.
— Louise Glück, from ‘The Solstice’
Last year I watched the sun rise from the inner circle of Stonehenge, psyche worn thin from hours of swaying faint in the dark, surrounded by druids and drugged up boys. Maïa and I, pressed so close in the throng we became a singular, two-headed girl.
This year’s solstice, Lily and I ate nectarines and read our fortunes at the heart of the labyrinth. The labyrinth conceded to us in only two turns and I was put out; I wanted to battle with the maze, feel vindicated after an appropriately long tussle.
I was crying when I left the house and I stopped crying when I saw Lily. The simplicity of affection, how it mends and makes whole. I was still as pale as my nightdress when I found the stick curved like a wishbone, like antlers: talismanic, lucky.
Lily showed me how to bind it with yarn to our other foraged sticks to make a shrine. A shrine, not quite an altar, being consecrated only by our giddy devotion and a makeshift cross at its crown.
I made midsummer wishes and tied them to the legs of the shrine, but I can’t tell you what they are.
Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June.
― Karen Joy Fowler
ritual III ♱ give in to the imperative to go barefoot, calloused, into the grasses, into the moors and the rivers, skin all stained by the cherry bitten open too eagerly, its stone spat to the dirt or saved for the apothecary. Midsummer is about the body, above all.
So the solstice came and fled. The darkness has started its slow and solitary stalk toward us; this is what the June madness has been trying to tell us. Relish in the light, it won’t stay.
But for now we are still in full-throated summer, singing of ease. And the days unfold like this: the paling of the sky and the crying of the thrush, moon open-bloomed in the blue, drinking down light with the same conviction as in the health of milk. The world with a clear look about it, though fogged around the edges.
And this day was like yesterday and the day before, and this day would be like tomorrow, and the day after. Sweet and elongated as syrup, fly wings dragged in honey. One length of time pooling stickily into the next without notice.
Blessed Midsummer, Blessed June.
𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔩𝔬𝔳𝔢,
𝔄𝔫𝔫𝔞 𝔊𝔦𝔰𝔢𝔩𝔩𝔢 𝔡𝔢 𝔚𝔞𝔞𝔩
@anna.c.dewaal & @lunulae.archive
beautiful 🤍🌞