To celebrate Summer Solstice in Summer, and indeed the Wheel of Earth’s orbit around Sun, the Seasonal Moments as they express themselves in your region, is an act of decolonising the mind. It is to set your self free of imposed arbitrary calendar, imposed by colonisers who have had an agenda of what constitutes a worthy measure of time, with which you may actually not agree. A uniform global method of telling time has a purpose, but its dominance has alienated humans from their place; and this is most obvious in the Southern Hemisphere, where mainstream culture celebrates a Winter festival in Summer (Christmas/Winter Solstice), and a Spring festival in Autumn (Easter/Spring Equinox).

It has huge benefit for the changing of mind to actually celebrate the actual Season: to get with the plot of Her Creativity in its full cycle. There She will teach so much … I have found. You learn there on Her lap, about where you actually are, in real time and space.

Summer Solstice poetry gets missed so often. It is a turning into the dark: it is not about “Love and Light” (Winter Solstice poetry may be for that). In the peaking of light at Summer there is the turning, the consuming, the dissolving, the dispersal. The overly christianised and dualistic cultural mythos that dominates minds around the globe has to re-learn that we participate in a cycle, a circle: and one thing becomes another. The mystics and wise ones of old never forgot that it was about “Love and Dark”: Her darkness was the colour of fertility, richness, the source whence we come and in which we are immersed. The darkness is actually Mother.

So do celebrate Summer Solstice: learn how to do it, or sort out your poetry if you already have ceremony. Poetry is powerful. Poiesis is the making of a world – the ancients understood this when they named Great Celtic Goddess Brigid as matron of Poetry. This is one of Her powers.

Forget Christmas in Summer: it will compromise your mind. The continual lip service and rote action to this unseasonal poetry is assent to a mind frame you may rather escape, and such escape may really be helpful to mind change on this planet. Such decolonising of the mind seems a matter of some urgency.

Glenys Livingstone, Summer (S.H.), 2019

For a related article: Attending to Summer Solstice Poetry