Solstice
When the wheel stills, if not the world
Far out on the reef that I grew up on, the sun slow to rise now as we grind into solstice. Though you cannot tell if you peer into the world, the stilling that defines the solstice is taking hold. For four days the sun will not move from its point on our horizon as it rises and sinks over our longest days and nights, our end points and outer reaches, seasonally adjusted.
This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar...
~ Margaret Atwood
I have loved these words so long that they operate as a spell all of their own, ringing in my head on approach every six months like a loop, a snare, a catch in my existence that regularly asks the same of a different version of me. Any threshold wants your attention too and whispers the same questions into the breezes that swirl through your world.
This one forms the cross that divides the wheel into four quadrants, or seasons. The threshold is the cardinal ingress, a hingeing point by name and by nature. Cardinal water, the season that sinks us into its various graces ruled by the moon. Doorway to the next season of our lives which sets in from here, differently depending where you live and walk with the wheel of nature. All the cogs turn and catch at similar points because they are inextricably woven; nature and time and space and weather and all the heavenly bodies including yours.
For centuries and time immemorial all of our ancestors venerated this threshold. It wasn’t that they lived “close” to nature, as though the artifice we have constructed atop it has changed the essence of life on earth. They were part of the world they lived in, so “nature” wasn’t separate. It determined their lives, how they moved and where they went, what they ate and how they dressed, how they felt and what they thought. Is it not still the same for you too? Somewhere beneath the global screaming and constant lightspeed space of life on screens. Deep in the craving for simple or real or slow. Lingering in the maw that hungers for connection that isn’t contrived, gated or watched.
The wheel of the year reminds us of the pace our bodies are built for, the one that lets us live and thrive as part of a far grander cycle. There is remarkable regulation built in, centuries away from the apocalyptic anxiety that defines most of our waking moments these days. Our lives, like the seasons, have their harvest and their attrition which is how things stay in balance. The maxim of this too shall pass rests on the pendulum swing of this perpetual motion and law of our universe. So whether it is constant growth or youth or profit or claim, our world’s artifice and entitlement its reaching the peak of its end game. The furthest tipping point of maximum imbalance. The teeming trough of bread and circuses, darkness and depravity, the imaginary heights of baked in structural inequity and a manifest lack of integrity.
As a practicing witch who keens a deep sense of reverence to the old ways as much as symbiotic obligation for the traditions that hold us close to the elemental dance of life on earth, observation of these sabbats is deeply personal. Here I find my faith and what I consider to be divine. I like to peer into these thresholds as pools as much as portals, scrying their architecture as part of my own regular ritual practice, the one I have etched over the years on to these spokes as I pass them by once more. They operate as milestones in my life, places from which to look forwards and backwards. As crossroads that show me where and how choices and mindset have shifted since the last season. At each vantage I can feel into how the new season is inviting me into its imperatives this year and apply that to what is actually going on in my life.
No threshold speaks in a tongue you can understand if you refuse its shadows, or your own dancing as you pass through. Not sure how to clock them as everything conspires you to carry you away with it? Anything you draw out of your chattering head and create all by yourself with hands and heart carries your frequency and your intention at the time. It is a reflection and too a revelation. As witches we may call it spellcraft or ritual. As artists and inventors, we may call it creativity. In the age of AI encroachment on our bodies and minds, it will increasingly become the vital link to our uncorrupted humanity.
The solstice still point tows in Cancer season as Gemini’s skittery skattery switch hitting finally gives way to oceanic depths. Now may we float instead of glitch, and not a moment too soon. This deeper shift and re-alignment is oft as imperceptible as it is immense. The move into Cancer is cardinal territory, dynamic initiation that does not ask before it demands seasonal dexterity. Cancer season ordinarily plunges us into all the feels and heightens sensitivity. To everything and everyone, which means you cannot ignore anything - or anyone - that feels off. The ick is real. The sign of the scarab shows up the hard shell and soft underbelly all at once, bracing against new exposure while testing different vulnerabilities as the world continues to shunt. Too easily we forget our innate powers of regeneration and phantom gnosis, as easily found in the depths as the heady heights. Resilience is borne of it all, and it moves us through all the shifting tides and spinning wheels.
This year the Cancer solstice is entangled, its threshold mingling with Chiron’s move into Taurus after seven years in the wild I Am’s of Aries. The last time Chiron was in Taurus in the late '70s coincided with the original discovery of this asteroid that forms a bridge between Saturn and Urania. This shift is significant generationally as well as collectively for the present.
Chiron’s mythology of the wounded healer who becomes the greatest teacher is a treatise on overcoming. It subverts modernity’s neat devaluation of lived experience into buzzwords that disavow its impact, that you continue to live long after everything else moved on. Our wounded healer now advancing from Aries' identity wounds and plunging into the material world of the body, the earth and all our physical resources. Picking up where Urania left off revolutionising sustainable relationships to all of the above in Taurus for the last seven years. This move ensures none of us can proceed without paying our dues to the corporal nature of this world, this earth, this life which is tragic news for ascensionists everywhere. Back to the mud and blood you go, where Chat GPT cannot save you for lack of mud and love, and all the money in the world.
I am blooming from the wound where I once bled
~ Rune Lazuli
Astrologer Rick Levine plugs Chiron into our chart as a marker of our humanity. Certainly most all our life stories feature a wound that begets a challenge, whose initiation fosters transcendent growth, the story all of us have that would break a heart if you could tell it true. Vulnerability is baked into all of our becoming because there is nothing authentic about a constant uninterrupted trajectory of success, marvel and good fortune. That also is not the way this world works unless you have gamed its tenets and then hidden how. All the wizards curtains fall eventually. As the asteroid that builds a bridge from Saturn’s structure and integrity to Urania’s evolutionary zeitgeist, Chiron is also a constant constructor who must alchemise pain and turn it into something that shapes the future rather than destroys it before it arrives.
From now until September when Chiron retrogrades back into Aries for a last hurrah, expect a potent physical preview of pain points or emotional healing still required for you too to cross this next bridge from past to future. Everything we have technically built atop the real world still has to put its roots and foundations into the good soil of material reality and make it work on far more than than the tech bro’s imaginary planes of inequity. The difference will continue to show itself out, and up in your life.
Gen X’s are the Chiron in Aries kids. Latchkeyed and wildly unsafe, moving in a world before witness that pre-dated phones and the internet and ubiquitous constant absorption. We weren’t connected to it, busy tunnelling away from its terrible tenets. We were connected - most often by music and art - to each other, building alternative worlds to the ones we grew up in where we felt accepted, seen or safe. Not all of us made it but everyone was welcome to come as you are, in the words of our greatest prophet. Most of us are getting now to the other side of our Chiron return. At 50, we become who we’re meant to be or we still have not made it out alive. You can tell the ones who have cracked their own code.
As we also crest our next retrograde season, the solstice conjures these darkest shadows of our collective cry for relief and reorientation, ricocheting and magnifying the lot. This remains our greatest revision test : how we save ourselves from what now passes into history. Perhaps the most fitting legacy there could be for the all the prophets we crucified and lost along the way.
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