Fire Keeping The Summer Solstice

Like a diamond, coal is the result of things under tremendous load and the compressing of light down into a black, immovable void. It's a dark lustre that sits beneath the tons above it until one day it is kicked to the surface. Free, but still. Still, in the way that stillness is the slow metamorphosis to freedom and light. Here, coal clings to the familiar pattern of condense and compact, waiting for the catalyst of liberation to arrive. Hoping, stretching faith, maybe even certain that it cannot be winter forever.

Then along comes the flame, and just like that, coal's potential is unleashed, split alight and flaring its darkness upwards into a warm, bright glow. Fire is strongest when well-hearthed, giving it steady ground before filling the room with gold, and enabling the meal to sear on the griddle.

Summer Solstice | Sun enters Capricorn Monday, December 22nd, 2:03am AEDT

The element of FIRE manifests through the brilliant bright of our sun Helios, riding his chariot so very close to our rooftops, unbridled in height and velocity. This is unapologetic purity, and yet, as with all things that become full, it is also the beginning of the end.

At Summer Solstice, we meet the full expression of the Divine Masculine in his robes and stag horn crown. He is king and patriarch, he is husband, father and provider, he is protector, lover, and tender gardener of the heart, for the heart is his realm in the same way that the dark womb of the belly belongs to his woman.

To meet the full sun of the Capricorn Solstice is to step into a radiant field and be bathed in light. For when he is healed and strong, he is benevolent, kind, wise and true. The coal is a worthy metaphor for the journey of light into the bone mother's winter, but it is silent and dark without the initiation of flame. And the flame is nothing without the coal to cling to. They are wedded in the truest sense of the word.

The feminine is inextricably dependent on the masculine to threshold the power that grows in her dark. While the creativity of the masculine in the outer world is empty without the feminine that hearths him.

In the cycle of seasons, from winter's underwater caverns to summer's bright blue skies, we become fluent in the language that moves us from out here to in there, from radiant light to deep, condensed dark. From the way love flows towards another, to the way it must cycle back to the giver to feed the whole. All states are beauty and grace, and all are wholly necessary if the world is to turn on its axis as it does.

So as we come to this year's Solstice verge, we are right to be overcome with light. But we are also wise to acknowledge the dark principle that feeds it. The quiet, deep inner work that allows us to shine radiantly, broadly and openly when the time comes. And surely it will.

While the summer solstice comes over a three-day arc in the June or December months, depending on your hemisphere, really, it can come any time. Just when everything appears to be in luminous forward flow, the summer solstice can hit, and you realise that all full things must become empty and dark again.

But these are not times to despair. For all endings are good ones under Universal Law, and there is still time to give thanks and to play in the sun before we fill the larder and retreat indoors against the cold.

If nothing else, the summer solstice is the cycle of the year in which gratitude must be, first and foremost, your truth. Its Divine Masculine has worked hard in the fields to cast his light and warmth upon the very depth of winter's seeds, coaxing and initiating until they breach the surface, green with promise. He spoke to them at great length of fruits, flowers and grains, encouraging them to stretch their green limbs beyond the trellis, their boughs beyond the fence line.

Meanwhile, all this takes great strength and unshakeable faith.

As the sun reaches its perihelion here, our masculine principle, for the first time since the Spring Equinox, will turn his mind to the dewy pillow of his rest. In the coming months, his bright light will soften and deepen into late summer's diffuse gold, before bleaching completely in the autumn. Then, his counterpart will pull the green vision back into the soil, lovingly tending his resting embers as she does. Her work is to hold the whole of the field in a rarefied rest such that it might gather and orient itself anew in her dark. Then, when his creative force once again returns, together they will birth the new.

Her vision. His creative force.

Over these days, look up and name the light. What has brought you radiant joy this cycle? What did you create? What did you grow? And who did you love while you did so? Where did you find joy, and who or what was your lighthouse? Where did your brave green turn to fruit and seed? And where are you grateful, thankful and glad?

Be in the light of gratitude over these powerful sun-filled days. Receive the love of the sun with a whole, wide heart, even as you know night will come soon enough. Become familiar with the joy that comes from contentment. The type of light that rises from a flickering coal in a well-tended hearth.

We are each firekeepers of the inner light, and when held against the oncoming dark, we understand that there is nothing more alive than living life through the lens of death. Beginnings through the vector of their ends.

These are days in which to acknowledge our strength, our courage, our creativity, and everywhere sacred activism made us a force for good in the world.

Blessings for the Summer Solstice
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