Summer Solstice
Our Great Reward
I had a conversation on the recent summer solstice about the difference between a solstice and an equinox. It was one of those topics I’m sure I once understood, vaguely, and now don’t understand at all. It is the great paradox of our age that we know a great many things, and yet nobody seems to know anything.
The equinox is the calendar’s moment of balance: twelve hours of darkness, twelve of light. It’s immediately followed by the solstice, which in this time of year in this hemisphere brings the longest day of the year and the official start of summer.
I once tried to write a novel that I wanted to call Summer Solstice. The title alone felt breathy enough to carry a vaguely young-adult mix of heavy themes - light and dark, life and death, love and indifference. Naming a book before it’s written brings the same curse as the band with a name but no song. I failed, mercifully. The book never found its voice, or I hadn’t found mine, and the world was spared more emotional drivel from another writer without a clue of what to say. But the attempt came after a season of loss. Two friends gone within months, my grandmother passed weeks after her son, my uncle. These events happened at separate times, but I wondered how the character I had written would hold up if that all came crashing down at once. Grief had drawn close then, and I found myself trying to make sense of it in the context of summer, a season I began to see not just as sunshine and heat, but as a kind of counterweight. A balancing agent. A way to hold the sorrow without letting it tip everything else into darkness.
As a kid, summer was the season that made things bearable. Its lightness, its long days, its warmth, they held off life’s darker stuff, at least for a while. It was our great reward for surviving the rest of the year. But now I think it’s more like a temporary ceasefire. Summer isn’t endless, and it never was.
Maybe that’s why I couldn’t finish the book. Trying to hold onto something that is already gone seldom works. Grief, meaning, even summer itself, cannot be held in place. There is no balance without movement. Maybe the story I wanted to tell would have offered something whole or redemptive, but loss doesn’t work that way. I had only collected these fragments of time, flashes of memory which came as unfinished conversations and the weight of people who were gone, suddenly. And maybe that’s all we ever get. There is no closure, not really. Only a mild sense of the things that mattered, briefly, before the light shifted and the season moved on.
The pagans marked the solstice with great ceremony. Fires, chants, and rituals to honor the sun at its height. We don’t do that in the modern world. At least not the semi-sane amongst us. We embrace it, and we take to the roads and the skies. We collect the smell of chlorine and suntan lotion and linger in late sunsets and warm winds. But we must also sit with the strange fact that the longest day is also the start of the slide back into darkness. We call it the beginning of summer, but it’s really the tipping point. The light peaks, then begins to leave us. I think about that now, not with sadness exactly, but in the good melancholy way of acceptance. It just is. Nothing holds. Not summer. Not people. Not even our brightest days. But for a little while, we get to stand in the warmth. And maybe that’s enough.
xAP