Summer Solstice: Peak Energy | Peak Inhalation

Editor’s note: Over the course of 2023, at the eight stations in the Wheel of the Year, Bart Everson will share with the Gaian community a guided, breath-based meditation. It is our hope that these meditations will help you to observe and to celebrate Gaia’s journey around the Sun, and to explore possible meanings embedded in various parts of the cycle. The particular meditation featured here is appropriate for the Summer Solstice, which falls in late June in the northern hemisphere and late December in the southern hemisphere. If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere in December, you may wish to listen instead to the winter solstice meditation.

Listen to Bart’s Meditation above or on Insight Timer or read the transcript below.
A Mandala Celebrating Summer Solstice (Image created by Bart Everson)

This is a meditation dedicated to Mother Earth, mother of us all, and to the summer solstice, the longest day, which usually falls around June 21st in the Northern Hemisphere, around December 21st in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s sometimes known as Midsummer in some cultures, though a lot of Americans think of it as the first day of summer. Some Neo-Pagans like to call it Litha. And what you’re hearing in the background is a recording that was actually made in a national park in Spain, on the summer solstice.

I would like to begin by observing the breath. Just make sure you’re seated comfortably, with an erect spine, and bring your attention just to lie lightly on your breath, just to notice how it is. Just breathing normally, but notice what it’s like, the characteristics of your breathing. Notice how it’s like a cycle: breathing in and breathing out, inhalation and exhalation.

Notice how we find the same cycles throughout nature if we look for them. So, we can draw an analogy to the cycle of the seasons. We know that for half of the year, the days get longer. In the other half of the year, the days get shorter. Like the inhalation and the exhalation of our breath. Drawing air in, letting air go. It’s similar to the rising tide of light which then subsides.

And in particular, for the solstice, we can bring our attention right to that moment where it turns around, right to that moment where the inhalation crests and the exhalation begins. What’s going on, in that moment? Can you notice the precise moment when the in-breath becomes the out-breath? That of course is the analog to the solstice, when the sun seems to pause in its march across the sky, and then after the solstice it heads in the other direction. We might not even notice, if we’re not paying attention.

Flowers are abundant in this moment of solar giving. (Image of a Flower Petal Mandala by Bart Everson)

If you like, you might visualize this moment, this mystery, this paradox, this thing which is also its opposite, this moment when breathing in becomes breathing out — you might visualize this perhaps as the Sun. It seems fitting, because the Sun is something we can’t look at directly. It’s too powerful. So, if we visualize it, we just imagine what it could be. Perhaps you might like to visualize it as a sunflower. Fiery leaves around the perimeter, radiating life and light and heat, with dark seeds at the center. Those dark seeds represent the idea that at this moment, at the solstice, the Sun at the height of its powers also begins to recede. It begins to become less. Darkness is born.

Even as we acknowledge this limit, we feel also the light and love of the Sun. We feel. Who are we? We are the Earth. We are Mother Earth. We are part of the global ecosystem. The solstice is like a love affair between Earth and Sun. Starhawk calls it “the Give-Away time of the Sun.” The superabundance of solar energy that makes possible our ecosystem, the radiant light that sustains Gaia, the very web of life of which we take part: this is a gift. We enjoy all this richness freely, nor are we merely recipients of this beneficence. We also participate in it. Like the flowers, we can flourish, creating something new and beautiful. The Give-Away is not just to us, but of us.

Celebrating the gift of solar energy with an offering of flowers. (Image by Bart Everson)

So with gratitude to teachers like Starhawk and Glenys Livingstone and many others, I would like to thank dobroide at freesound.org for the beautiful background recording, and of course all our ancestors, spiritual and biological, going back in an unbroken chain for billions of years, deriving all sustenance from the Earth and the life-giving energy of the Sun. Thank you for listening also, and I wish you a happy solstice.

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