Summer Solstice and Fathers

Today I watched the Summer Solstice from Stonehenge via English Heritage’s Facebook Live at about 4.45am UK time and 11.45am Singapore time. There was not a lot of sun it looked an overcast cool morning back in Blighty but it was lovely nonetheless. Even though I am extremely divided about Facebook, having this opportunity was a marvelous thing, bringing a little pagan magic onto my device streamed into my room. I watched it just prior to my weekend 90 minute Hot Yoga workout (I get to do a full 90 minutes on a Sunday rather than the 45 or 60 mins on weekdays). I follow the Hot 26 or Bikram series and watch Harry the teacher via his Zoom videos – again another piece of magic tech (for yoga IS magic and an technology) brought to me over air and internet from England into my Singapore home post circuit-breaker (Phase 2). So unusually for me, this afternoon I am grateful for Facebook and Zoom as much as for Harry and English Heritage. Two worlds colliding.

It was both these rituals and practices today, this Fathers Day, that gave me living energy, love, healing and an infusion of joy. Joy too for Fathers. For my husband the father and all his gorgeousness and for my father my son’s grandfather for all his awesomeness. On this the Sun’s day, the Summer SOLstice, the solar eclipse in this very next hour over Asia – I give thanks for husband, father, son. And for planets, for elements and deities, for spiritual pagan megaliths and regular yoga practice, for sacred remedies and a magical life. As I write here, drinking my herbal flower tea after a cleansing bath - full of milk, magnesium, salt and lavender – with lit candle, light incense, homemade rose facial oil on my skin and the magic of a laptop and Microsoft Word and Google’s Blogger (both other sometimes-villains today I shall both bless), I am full of gratitude. My soul feels made-up and happy, fortunate and favoured.

Today I feel restored. I feel connected to all things powerful and ancient, to the four elements. Water in my bath and tea-potion cleanses me. The air blows the smudged sage incense to me and carries the internet connecting me to all things from blog to standing stones at solstice to rabbit pose on the mat. The earth 17 floors below me holds me in an apartment which is a cradle of love for my husband the father and my son. The same earth thousands of miles away holds my father and my mother, safe in England. The fire lights my candle and the heat in Singapore helps me sweat a workout. I feel each element’s amplified signal and I am full of wellbeing and energised anew. I feel peace and roads being opened, blocks being unblocked to clear the way ahead.

My soul is cared for this Sunday. I feel vital and lush, seasoned and yet new seed full of life. I am in flow yet also hold the stillness and the space. My medicine song typed as words on a page via a device, bewitches me, calls me in further to write. After the rain (and boy has it rained here) the wild grows, the plants reach up to the stars and spread their roots out below. The seasons do not change here so the solstice season patterns and weather are not effected by the midsummer ceremony on ancient fields. But I can choose to respond subtly from afar. This mother in the Lion City (mythic Merlion City indeed) is aware and thriving. I intuit the shifts and celebrations, I roll with the cycles, I weave new adventures underfoot and through book. With the virus pandemic I cannot travel physically to England but I can go there in my mind, fly my soul there through portal of hope and realm of the imaginal. In my minds’ eye and heart I fly there through wind and moonlight, over pulsing worlds below and hills brimming with faerie hedgerows and night owls. I follow the appley scent of fruit trees and Summer, craving domestic respite from work, skimming pebbles on sea shores that radiate like luminous jellyfish below. I am star child, child of Artemis, airy optimist in clouds above. I need no immunity passport to travel, here I am free to explore from up and above.

I take my breath, hold my meditative state, admire the magic geography of lands below, sleep on the wing, yoga through jetlag and emerge at dawn reborn. My sorrow replaced by sass, my dead ashes regenerated as butterfly emerging from cocoon, my inner torch ablaze with purpose, possibility, positivity and feeling of expansion. I shimmer and vibrate. What was impossible, forbidden – now complies to my command. Like a scrappy thing I’m rewilded and psyche blooms once more. The magic mends. It fixes tissue and muscle like a field nurse with stout heart on the frontline. And all at once, I am my mother, I am my grandmother – as soft as a bunny with bite of a tigress who came to tea. I am tough love for my soul. I am a rough edge with delicious sap. I’m an aura, a ripple, a jewel, a fern. I am grace and favour and my life, all life, is a gift. With bravery and fortitude I will walk through wars to come, Armageddon of technocracy and machine. But I remember today, who I am. Beyond the ordinary garden, lies the Healer’s Night Garden – Greek Queen Hecate’s medicines with sips of magical tea for sick souls at a life crossroads. Here too sits Janus, Roman god of endings and beginnings, facing both front and back, gatekeeping past and future. I remember. I AM.

Today, at a cellular level feeling it in my bones and my DNA and my veins, I am illuminated with this wisdom. With foresight I prophecize – in Hildegard of Bingen’s words – the “Beauty of Earth’s greenings”.

Stonehenge is the ruins left by man in nature, I choose my own equinox of thought - within me the human, always remains. I toast the fathers (my dad, my husband and all fathers), the land, the sun and the magic of all things.