Happy astronomical summer to us! Yes! The summer solstice has once again graced us with her magical energy. Does anything ignite more joy and anticipation than the longest day of the year, filled with the promise of sunshine and the hope that sunburns will turn into a tan? Not for me.
It makes me want to adorn my golden locks with flowers, throw on a long white dress, and be as naïve as Florence Pugh when she first arrived at the idyllic Swedish midsummer festival.
With the solstice approaching, I am always filled with eagerness and nostalgia for the time when a slip and slide didn’t sound like an accident waiting to happen and I thought Water World water was just pure H2O. This morning, as I woke up with these feelings, I realized I had only a vague understanding of the day's significance. Long day, short night, North Pole, rituals, crops, magic, no more school—that was all I could give ya. So, I got to work.
Let's dive into the details. The summer solstice (for us, North Hemi folk) is the moment when the North Pole is at max tilt facing the sun. More specifically, this axial tilt is 23.44°. Hence, the longest day of the year.
Sunglasses highly recommended. And just to brush up on what we already for sure know, yes, the Southern Hemisphere has its summer solstice while we experience our winter solstice in late December.
You also might be thinking, summer already started for me. My AC is cranked to the max, and for the first time all year, I’m jealous of teachers for their career path. You’re not wrong. For those who observe the meteorological seasons,1 your summer officially started on June 1. My apologies for not dedicating an entire post to your culture.
If you have this strange feeling that the solstice is trending a bit early this year, you’ve got great instincts. We actually haven’t had a solstice this early since 1796!2 When George Washington was president, Tennessee joined the party as our 16th state, and the first elephant arrived in the U.S. from India. Can you imagine? There was a time when we had no elephant access! According to my research, Americans couldn’t even look up videos of our largest land animals painting flowers at the time.
Why the strange solstice movement, you might ask. The simple answer is that we never really figured out our calendar system. The math just does not pencil out with our 24-hour days and 365-day journey around the sun.
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel provides a detailed breakdown of the history of our calendar system and why it’s so freaking confusing:
We have to account for the subtle, small changes in Earth’s axial tilt, as it’s the orientation of Earth’s axis returning to the position it was in a year prior that determines the onset and changing of the seasons, and hence, the duration of a year… according to the best way of calculating this that we know of, there are actually 365.242189 days in a year. And so, we needed to develop a calendar system that could accommodate this offset between “days” and how we experience a year on Earth.
We’ve tried all kinds of things. Our first generally accepted system was lunar, from new moon to new moon, which seemed to have worked quite well and offset with a 13th month known as an “intercalary month” every three years.
But then, things got political when Rome came to power, and all kinds of weird intercalary months started being added to keep consuls in power longer. Lit-er-a-lly adding more days to a year for personal gain. I think I now understand the timeframe Trump is referring to, which he’d like to circle back on.
Finally, Julius Caesar came in, saved the day, made the calendar all about the sun, and added a leap year every fourth year. People were mostly pleased with this, but there was a small hiccup: now all the solstices and equinoxes were all over the place because “the 'difference between the ‘true value’ of 365.242189 days in a year and the ‘assigned’ value of 365.25 days in a year results in a mismatch of just under one day per century.”
To settle this once and for all (hopefully!) we got ourselves the Gregorian calendar, which was enacted in October of 1582. That’s when they modified the leap year system and heroically skipped from October 4th to 15th, and everyone with a birthday in those ten days had to share one shepherd's pie in the town center and would be stoned for whining about it.
Now we have this cool leap year rule, which pretty much everyone seems down with for now, as long as the Southern Baptist Church doesn’t get bored complaining about IVF one day and decides that leap years are for devil worshipers.
Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the year 2000 is.
This also leads our solstice to trend on the earlier side until the next skipped leap year, which is 2100.
That’s a lot of information for a beautiful summer day, so let’s get to the magic✨
We are in days of light; granted extra time to relax and nourish our body, mind, and spirit. This is an opportunity to connect with nature's natural rhythms and tap into our real-lived experience.
Though modernity has trended away from tradition and religion, many of which honor the solstice with ritual and celebration, this does not mean we cannot assign our own significance and set aside time for reflection.
Instead of New Year's resolutions to get your body in ketosis and to finally (re)learn Spanish, the season's solstices and equinoxes invite opportunities to reflect at the top of each season.3
How have you changed since our last solstice? What was important to you then, and what is important to you now? What do you see for yourself this coming season, and how do you want to guide that vision into reality?
Allow yourself to dream, bask, and look at the world with a little more curiosity than you woke up with yesterday. Allow yourself to hold the light and darkness in your hands simultaneously. Delight in the sun’s rays and admire the beauty of the Strawberry Moon in the night sky.
Read this passage from The Book of Symbols and see if any images, feelings, or inspiration come to you:
In these countervailing extremes of light and darkness is the evocation of a limit reached in the arc of a life, a mood, a capacity, or in the hegemony of consciousness or unconscious. The Midsummer Night of the summer solstice is a night of fairy magic and dream, earth's extravagant, sun-imbibed bloom and the lust and tenderness of lovers. Since ancient times, traditional celebrations-roundels, or circular dances; feast-ing; the lighting of bonfires-on the summer solstice mark this longest day and yearly pinnacle of the sun's intensity.
How can we tap into the natural magic of the changing seasons? Do you hold any traditions around the solstice or have ideas for any you’d like to start practicing?
We’re probably all adherent to the meteorological seasons perspective, since it definitely feels like summer once the cal strikes June.
While the solstice can fall between June 20th and 22nd, it also falls at various times of day. We haven’t had one this early in the day on the 20th since 1796.
Oh no… is that where Equinox Fitness Club gets its name?! Subliminal messaging is incredible.
You mention the Julian and Gregorian calendars as improvements, but the Google calendar is what makes my world go round.
That’s for the next post ;)