A Solstice Story
I love midsummer, almost as much as I hate it.
I’ve always sought out the stories that revolve around the changing of the seasons, the varying lengths of days, and the way that available daylight changes the rhythm of our lives in subtle ways.
When my head isn’t quite as full as it currently is I look for everyday moments where magic peeps through the veil of modern life. I hunt for lesser known standing stones and their meanings. I revel in the feeling of not quite knowing. Of there being something beyond the hard certainties of modern life.
I’d also love to write whimsical stories of wearing flower crowns and wafting about in meadows on long summer evenings. Creating those sepia stained pictures of daisy chains and floaty dresses that could be any time between the 1950’s and now. But alas, I have absolutely appalling hayfever. It is now pretty well controlled, but for long stretches of my adult life the weeks from mid June to mid July were effectively a a tableau of used tissues, tablets and eye drops. And for some reason no one ever mentions that it makes you exhausted, literally, on a cellular level.
Six years ago, on solstice eve, I filled my body with antihistamine and a rucksack with a camping stove, freeze dried curry and non alcoholic beer and dragged my weary body and stinging eyes to one of my favourite local spaces.
It had been a strange few weeks.
I was over 40. Newly single again after the ending of a 2 year kind of friends with benefits, “situationship”, aka two slightly damaged adults who quite liked each other, but not enough to make the compromises and take the risks that a real relationship needs. And I had just returned from a month long trip solo van trip around Europe.
It felt like I was on the cusp of something, whilst also at risk of falling back into the same rut that the trip was supposed to drag me out of.
The ending of that romantic entanglement was a strange experience that had made me pause to look at my own actions and beliefs. It had been a comfortable couple of years of basically hanging around when it suited us both, but in a weirdly arms length kind of way. I find it disconcerting when I watch my teenage step daughter (ah ha, spoiler alert!) behave quite similarly with people in her orbit, although there is rather less of the helping to choose tiles and fit plug sockets than I was doing.
As I walked up towards a local moorland, through the early evening sunshine, rucksack on my back and dog by my side, I realised that it was a little busier than I had expected. It isn’t exactly a lonely spot but I didn’t quite expect the sound system and revellers that were gathering there. I shouldn’t really have been surprised, after all there is a small but well known stone circle perched in one corner and I am not the only person who likes to feel the shifting of the veil on certain dates. Nevertheless I was after quiet contemplation and a freeze dried curry, not a thousand new friends and a shared spliff.
I found a large flat boulder far enough away from the festivities to only hear a vague distant thump of the bass line and cracked open my tepid can of 0% beer whilst the water for my dinner boiled happily on a camping stove1 . My dog snoozed, absorbing the last of the days warmth from the rock beneath us.
I struggle with static meditation, to quieten my
mind often needs a focus or motion. In the midst of the worst moments of my life the only way to peace was through walking or driving. It unlocks the way into my mind, the space to think and dream, to honour my own needs and reflect on the expectations of the world around me.
My plan that evening wasn’t to have a revelation that would change my life, I wasn’t really looking for deep insight. It was as simple as getting back outdoors, refusing to fall back into the rut of half hearted living that had been temporarily been shaken away by taking a month away to explore. If I’d been pushed to suggest what might have popped into my head that evening I’m not sure I could have even envisaged what would unfold over the next few weeks.
In the space that I created on a balmy evening in the slowly dying sunlight of the longest day I realised that I didn’t want to be doing this on my own. It wasn’t at all a need for someone to be there. I was quietly confident and capable, I was enjoying myself, with my dog for company. It was more a dawning realisation that there was a possibility that this moment could be even sweeter.
The scars from the abrupt and dramatic ending of the earlier relationship that had caused me to move to my Peak District home and buy my small silver van still felt very fresh. I recognised that sweeter was feasible, but in order to get there I needed to open myself up and risk reopening the fractures of my barely mended heart. I had chosen myself for the previous couple of years by keeping myself safe and at arms length, but to move on any further I needed to choose myself in a wholly different, and more terrifying way.
As the sun started to dip below the horizon, and the bass gradually increased in volume I packed my cooled stove and dinner detritus into my bag. My brow creased slightly with the fear and worry that what my soul was telling me I needed would only be another visit to a vale of pain and hurt.
There is something magical about midsummer though, it feels like a time when your soul should win over your cautious head and wary heart, and as I meandered back off the hillside to the comfort of my stone cottage I made a decision.
I was going to choose me, I was going to choose boundaries and healthy partnership and in order to get there I was going to have to be all in.
I’m not going to end this with a trite happy ending, although on paper and in life there has been one. On the 3rd July I met someone for the first time and we haven’t stopped talking, laughing and arguing since.
A pandemic, puppy, van build and a helping or two of grief later we’re still going. There has been a whole lot of pain and patience, compassion and confusion to get us here and even six years on this is only the start. Each year I pause a little around this time and make space to check in with myself. This year I’ve written it down to share.
None of us know what the future holds, but creating those moments to let your soul speak to the rest of you is always important. The hardness of the world at the moment is making that really difficult for me, and I suspect I’m not alone in those feelings. So, as we go into the longest days of this year I’m going to consciously open myself up to the beauty and wonder of the world and I invite you to join me in whichever way feels right to you.
A gentle reminder, if anyone wants to recreate this please don’t even light a camping stove in the Peak District this year. The ground is tinder dry and one spark could lead to enormous devastation. This had been a much damper year and the risk much lower.