Marking the Summer Solstice

the permanence and impermanence of the world's most famous stone circle

Photo by Dyana Wing So on Unsplash

Before I tell you about my solstice experiences, I need to tell you about my upcoming online, substack course: What to Look for in Summer, which begins on Friday 5th July 2024. If you are already a paid subscriber to Notes from the Margin, you do not need to do anything, you are automatically enrolled and you will receive your course notes each Friday in a paywalled substack post. If you would like to join the course, I have a 10% discount on annual subscriptions, which will give you access to the course, plus my archive of previous courses, and all paywalled articles and essays.

Alternatively, you can go to my website and pay for a place (£25) and your notes will be sent to you via email. Here’s the link to the website, where you can find out a bit more about the course: Wendy’s Website

Running courses, workshops and mentoring (some exciting news about new mentoring services coming soon) are how I pay my bills, it would help enormously if you could share the news of the course. Thank you so much for your support.

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Now that the news bit is out of the way, let’s get back to the solstice and the stones.

I’ve been in booth for three days recording the audio book of The Ghost Lake this week.

It’s a strange, intimate experience to record your own book, and to know that when people listen to that book, it will be your own voice they hear, your own accent. In the last session I covered chapters in the book that explore the solstice, or rather my own first deliberate witnessing of a summer solstice sunrise. That witnessing was a magical experience, a moment in which I pushed out of my comfort zone and accepted something in me that had been yearning to do something spiritual. To stand on the seafront and watch the sun rise slowly, reaching out and touching my feet as I stood and deliberately stopped - myself, my world - to watch the sun rise, a daily occurrence that was somehow made special because it was the point at which the earth’s face was turned towards the dark.

Anything can be magical, a person can give reverence to anything. But there is something special about knowing that our human ancestors have been witnessing, acknowledging this point in the earth’s cycle, as a part of our own life cycle, for thousands of years. There is something special about that connection, about creating your own version of a sacred act, of finding the sacred in yourself and allowing it o be such, something that is missing from so much of our modern lives. I say ‘our’ and I am referring, with the privilege of a white woman living in the UK, to other westerners, and I am aware that not everyone has lost their connection to the earth, their ancestors, themselves.

I’ve been o a journey to find that connection, that wild ancestor in myself. I crushed that connection down for a long time in order to fit in. That’s what The Ghost Lake is about: authenticity, finding the sliver of wild within you and nurturing it, nourishing it, reconnecting to yourself and your environment.

I worried for a while about getting ‘the wrong day’ for my solstice activities. Something about my neurodivergent brain is quite keen to find the exact right time to witness the event, the exact moment when the world turns. I’m trying to move away from that, trying to undo that rigid thinking, and it’s working. I prefer to think of midsummer, the three or four days in which the world is re aligning itself. These are my days to reset my brain, my life, my, for want of a better word, and with a slight brought-up-methodist cringe - my spirituality. Last night my husband and I celebrated the completion of the audio book, and the first decent summer evening of the year, by lighting the fire pit and barbecuing halloumi. As I leaned back in my chair, face to the sun, Prosecco in hand, I felt that this too was also a kind of celebration that had been happening for thousands of years. Not the cheese, (though maybe the cheese?), definitely not the prosecco, but certainly food, certainly drink, certainly fire, certainly being joyful at midsummer and aware of the world turning.

Tonight I shall mark the sunset with another fire pit fire and I’ll sit out until it gets dark. I’ll witness the sunset on the longest day. Tomorrow I’ll rise at four and go and witness the sunrise, maybe in my garden, maybe on the seafront. But it will be witnessed. There will be a recognition of the shortest night having passed. I’ll listen to my own thoughts, my own body’s reaction to a point in the year which, unless it is deliberately witnessed, could be any normal evening, any night passing. I will be giving this moment a deliberate reverence. It is the deliberateness of the witnessing that makes it special.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

I’ve never been to Stonehenge, though it’s on my bucket list. I have watched the summer solstice at Stonehenge on TV and never really wanted to be there for the event. I’m sure it is a great atmosphere, and there is something to be said for many humans coming together to witness, but because we are all so distanced from the original rituals and meanings of Stonehenge, we are all making it up as we go along, creating our own rituals, our own methods of witnessing, and that means a great big group of people joined by the event, but all marking it slightly differently - loudly, quietly, drunkenly, soberly - I would find it difficult to settle into my own sacred space among the energy of so many people. The site itself though i find amazing. I feel a kind of awe at the sacredness of those stones. Again, it is the connection point, the continuity that I like, and finding myself on the end of that long trail of human experience.

Photo by Michal Ico on Unsplash

Yesterday, activists from Just Stop Oil threw paint at some of the stones.You can read about it here: Stonehenge Sprayed with Orange Powder Paint

You can read JSO’s statement here: Just Stop Oil

My immediate reaction was to be horrified. What on earth does damaging the stones accomplish? They are going to distance people from their cause. How dare they damage our ancient heritage…etc. The lichen! The porous stone surface!

Knee jerk stuff born of hurt to see something you admire, even love, being targeted. It took me a while to think through my reactions and to assess the actual damage done. I’m still not sure how I feel.

These stones are not just a marker for an ancient civilisation, they are a mirror reflecting our own values and our own actions, they are a continuity of our society. This too, is a part of our human species story.

I will be angry if there is permanent damage. But as far as I can see, it was cornflour paint, stuff that has been mainly blown away with a leaf blower this morning.

I’ve just seen an article about JSO throwing orange paint over the private jets at an airport, including Taylor Swift’s jet. The story is getting much less coverage than the Stonehenge story.

I feel torn about the actions of JSO around art and heritage. It feels unfair to be targeting the ordinary people who actually value their connection to the earth. But the thing is, because we are tied into a style of existence in which we are annihilating the environment - insect numbers reduced due to pesticides, half of UK bird species in decline, people literally dying of floods, heat, pollution, a raft of plastic the size of a country drifting across the ocean…etc if we don’t act then all we will have is a bunch of stones, probably damaged by the pollution in the air, the lichen dying because of what we are doing to the planet. There will be no one to witness the solstice. There will be no one to feel the sacredness of continuity. We will not continue.

What did JSO accomplish? Everyone is talking about it. I am not sure if that will drive real change, because mostly people are angry at the protestors, people aren’t saying ‘I’d better pressure my government so JSO stop protesting in this way’ they’re saying ‘JSO are pathetic’. People are angry at JSO, not the destroyers of the environment. JSO are the sort of people attached to the environmental movement that makes people hate on that movement, that makes people turn away from any desire to help because they feel personally targeted, and it feels unfair that people who are trying to do their bit in a world dominated by capitalism that makes it almost impossible to make cleaner decisions are the ones being targeted, not the billionaires in the jets and not the oil companies themselves. But by targeting these people, the anger that they feel is drawing attention to the cause in a way that spraying a private jet is just not.

Meanwhile, the stones of Stonehenge continue to exist, never doing anything other than their own purpose - to be rocks that just so happen to have been moved into a structural alignment by the world’s most destructive animal.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

Tonight I will light my fire and watch as the sky darkens only to that vague purple-blue that we get up here in the northern hemisphere, and tomorrow I’ll watch it lighten again. Maybe I’ll witness the sun climbing over the lip of the valley and feel connected to my ghost lake ancestors who have been doing the same for so many thousands of years. And that will be enough for me.

It’s eight weeks to publication day for The Ghost Lake. If you want to help me get the book into shops, you can pre order it here: Bookshop

Until next time.

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