Meditations on Midsummer

Midsummer Morning 2023

The rain smells so good, especially after it has been so dry and sunny for so many days. I love the rain, I always have, and the grey skies and close feeling of the air. As much as I love it, and feel joy in it, I feel sad this morning.

It is Midsummer, and the garden is growing thick and tall, and the sky is heavy with rain, and this is one of the great points on the wheel of the year, and I often feel sad. That may seem strange, to feel sad on the high holidays, but to me it seems right and normal.

Many people busy themselves with holidays. They are festivals, after all, and there is much to organize, much to do. But for me, a little apart from the rest, the witch who lives just at the edge of the village, I have other observations of the day. I remember the sacrifice, the god whose corpse fertilizes the fields. I remember the long dark winter, and the one to come. I remember the fevers that come when too many gather together in the hot summer months, and the women who die in childbirth, and the men who never return from battle.

But there are other things too in the dark, the white roots that grow strong in good soil, the pure waters that rise up from stone and clay, the deep cool storehouses that guard the grain and the dead.

There is something about the high holidays that makes me sad and dreamy and content and the rain smells so good, and the tea is hot and strong, and the jays are calling to one another, celebrating the plentiful peanuts in the feeder and the rich, growing smells of midsummer.

The garden is a sea of green right now, and the marigolds we planted between the vegetables are glowing orange in the rain. They manage to bring a bit of Samhain to Midsummer and I love it, I love the sense of the cycles, lush and inexorable. I love the slow, inevitable turning of the wheel. I love the colours and the textures, each season becoming the next. The marigolds will stand through the long hot summer, sentinels guarding the green plants day and night, bringing Autumn’s glorious colour to the cabbage and basil beds.

The rain softens everything, and the colours glow in this light, and the sadness feels like joy, birth and death and growth and decay all tangled together, the transformation and becoming, the glorious life that pours forth from the earth while I sit quietly with my notebook, between the garden and the fireplace, gently worshiping the midsummer morning with my grief.

I’ve long struggled to describe the sorrow that feels like joy. It is there in the wind that moves the wet branches of the hedge, in the chatter of the jays and the snap of the fire in the hearth. It is there in the grey-green leaves of the cabbage, the stretching height of the sunflowers, the sway of the tulip poplar over the fence. I am content to be a little sad, as the year balances on this longest day and the Lady turns Her face to the dark months ahead.